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smalpest-95K quickstart guide

March 04, 2024 — shinohai

I am doing some experiments with jonsykkel's smalpest on some Android devices, and whipped up this post in case my memory fails me as I attempt to run this on yet another smol device. I will update with the termux build instructions for android below.

Start your smalpest instance inside a GNU screen instance:

screen -S smalpest -dm /usr/sbin/smalpest -u $USER -p $PASS -i 6697 -q 7778

Now connect to localhost:6697 from your irc client, and you can populate a pestnet wot:

Add a handle for PEER:

%PEER $PEER

Then add a KEY for PEER:

%KEY $PEER $KEY

Update the AT (Address Table) for PEER:

%AT $PEER $IP:$PORT

Start chatting and see if you appear in the bitdash logs.

Termux build instructions:

PLACEHOLDER

Tags: News, UNIX, Tools

Building awt's akris pestnet client on Gentoo

July 28, 2023 — shinohai

awt recently released a new station and client library dubbed "akris" for use with the pestnet protocol. Detailed instructions for installing it using various methods are detailed on alethepedia, but here I am documenting how I built on Gentoo in a virtual environment using Python 3.11 and esthlos-v.

I started by creating the python virtual environment in my /devel/ directory, making sure I specified my py interpreter since akris-desktop requires Python >= 3.11. Then we switch to the newly created directory and activate the venv.

python3.11 -m venv pest 
cd pest/ && source bin/activate

Now we make a directory for akris and grab the vpatches and seals:

mkdir -p akris && cd $_
mkdir -p patches/ seals/ wot/
wget http://v.alethepedia.com/akris/akris-genesis-99999.vpatch -P patches/
wget http://v.alethepedia.com/akris/akris-genesis-99999.vpatch.thimbronion.sig -P seals/
wget http://wot.deedbot.org/57512CE78CF08BB25FE277A4B16136257FB8FBDD.asc -O wot/thimbrion.asc

After obtaining the needed ingredients, we can now press using V:

v press akris-genesis-99999.vpatch .

When the press completes successfully, we can install the akris station library to our venv using pip:

pip install -e .

Now we can move back to the root 'pest' directory and make a new directory to install the desktop components in:

cd ~/devel/pest
mkdir -p gui && cd $_
mkdir -p patches/ seals/ wot/

Grab the patches and seals much like we did above for the station library:

wget http://v.alethepedia.com/akris_desktop/akris-desktop-genesis-99999.vpatch -P patches/
wget http://v.alethepedia.com/akris_desktop/akris-desktop-genesis-99999.vpatch.thimbronion.sig -P seals/
wget http://wot.deedbot.org/57512CE78CF08BB25FE277A4B16136257FB8FBDD.asc -O wot/thimbrion.asc

Press it, again using `V`:

v press akris-desktop-genesis-99999 .

akris-desktop requires tk, so you might need to install it from portage:

emerge -av dev-python/tk

Once that completes, you will have to manually install icons and imagery for the gui client, since `vdiff` does not handle binary files:

cd akris-desktop/
wget http://v.alethepedia.com/akris_desktop/images.tar.gz
wget http://v.alethepedia.com/akris_desktop/images.tar.gz.thimbronion.sig

Verify the signatures before untarring, because you aren't a heathen:

gpg-1.4.10 --verify images.tar.gz.thimbronion.sig images.tar.gz

gpg: Signature made Tue Jul 25 10:54:59 2023 EDT
gpg:                using RSA key 0xB16136257FB8FBDD
gpg: Good signature from "Thimbronion " [unknown]
Primary key fingerprint: 5751 2CE7 8CF0 8BB2 5FE2  77A4 B161 3625 7FB8 FBDD

Now we have verified sigs, decompress and clean up:

tar zxf images.tar.gz
rm -f images.tar.gz images.tar.gz.thimbronion.sig

Then install akris-desktop using pip:

cd ..
pip install -e .

Now we're almost done. Go back to the root pest directory:

cd ~/devel/pest

Create a little start script called "start-gui" for ease of use containing the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
python gui/bin/main.py

Now you can easily start your pest station and client from the virtual environment by running `./start-gui`. If all goes well, you'll be greeted with a screen like this:

For more information, visit alethepedia: akris and akris-desktop.

Tags: News, Linux, Tools

Suckless st regrind

April 19, 2023 — shinohai

This is just a redo of the original st vpatch with a tweak that allows drawing of images directly to the terminal. Much like the patch listed in the st FAQ this version does not cancel double-buffering, thereby doing away with the flickering that I observed when I first tried this. While not perfect, it does render images well with w3m for me, and by abusing the w3m image display doubles as a simple image viewer with a little bash-foo. Here's how you do that:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -z $1 ]; then
    echo
    echo "USAGE: timg "
    echo
    exit 0;
fi

W3MIMGDISPLAY="/usr/local/bin/w3mimgdisplay"
FILENAME=$1
FONTH=14
FONTW=8
COLUMNS=`tput cols`
LINES=`tput lines`

read width height <<< `echo -e "5;$FILENAME" | $W3MIMGDISPLAY`

max_width=$(($FONTW * $COLUMNS))
max_height=$(($FONTH * $(($LINES - 2))))

if test $width -gt $max_width; then
height=$(($height * $max_width / $width))
width=$max_width
fi
if test $height -gt $max_height; then
width=$(($width * $max_height / $height))
height=$max_height
fi

w3m_command="0;1;0;0;$width;$height;;;;;$FILENAME\n4;\n3;"

tput cup $(($height/$FONTH)) 0
echo -e $w3m_command|$W3MIMGDISPLAY

st vpatch and seals

Tags: News, Linux, Tools

A rainy Saturday in the lab

December 17, 2022 — shinohai

I recently obtained an esp32 based smartwatch and have succeeded in building a stable firmware that runs freebasic. While I did get jurov's recipe for ulisp working, I wanted to still be able to use the gui when lisp is running, so enter fb-lisp.

tl;dr - I mirrored the freebasic code here.

Working:

Wifi no longer crashes webserver, so triggering screenshots via wget is possible again. Time and BTC to local fiat price sync operational.

Also this past week I finally shut down the server running busybot to pestnet. I can't justify the server for it and want to focus on making something more stable in the bot arena so it can read me logs back, etc.

Meanwhile on Pestnet, Lord cringe makes an appearance, so hurr-durr read-only for now!

Blatta performance on the pogoplug is sub-optimal, but runs much more efficiently under termux (as does smalpest) so I will switch back over when I have time to chroot the armv7 device again.

Besides, it's a rainy Saturday morning and I'd rather play blackjack on the mc10 anyway.

Tags: Bitcoin, News, UNIX

The lightning experiment, or LN is a shitcoin

August 23, 2022 — shinohai

Back in 2020, I was casually reading the logs one morning when Joe Rodgers (WoT:joerodgers), Bitcoin Magazine alumni, decided to pop into chat and link a rss aggregator "powered by Lightning" for those assembled to view. Up to this point I had never touched a single satoshi powered by it so the conversation started thus:

shinohai: I had nfi anyone was even using Lightning Network. Still trying to solve 30 cent problems instead of $3000 ones I guess.
asciilifeform: shinohai: 99% of the work (if can dare to use word 'work'...) of a shitcoin perpetrator, is to create a synthetic appearance of 'use'
asciilifeform: is how they get it into goxes, pump up exch rate, etc
joerodgers: Are you suggesting LN is a shitcoin?
asciilifeform: joerodgers: it is. albeit with slightly more than the usual amt of 'bitcoin flavouring' added
asciilifeform: joerodgers: if anything, it's the most cynically fraudulent type of shitcoin, in that it purports to be equivalent somehow to actual bitcoin (y'know, the kind where tx follows the 2009 format, and gets mined into actual blocks..)
asciilifeform: while in actuality, it ain't
joerodgers: Ok, thanks for sharing.
asciilifeform: this isn't some kinda mega-revelation. if you read the docs, will become entirely clear what it is
joerodgers: I need to read the LN docs to see where it explains this
asciilifeform: in other lulz .
shinohai: joerodgers: https://lightning.network/docs/ "whereby transactions are sent over a network of micropayment channels ... whose transfer of value occurs off-blockchain."
joerodgers: Are you opposed to any development off the main chain? No L2/sidechains?
shinohai: Kinda defeats the purpose of a blockchain, neh?
shinohai: lel asciilifeform "Plox to mirror it FOR ME"
asciilifeform: joerodgers: can't speak for other people, but i'm opposed to fraud. and folx who push a paypal-like item as 'equiv. of bitcoin' are committing fraud.
joerodgers: It provides a trustless scaling solution?
joerodgers: fair enough
asciilifeform: joerodgers: somehow i was under the impression that you've eaten years of #t logs. and therefore familiar with the favourite strategy of the enemy over past decade, i.e. pushing baroque crocks of shit under banner of 'scale bitcoin'
joerodgers: Paypal takes custody of your funds and asks for KYC, I don't see how LN is that.

The conversation carries on in the logs, which you can read here but I decided to go slum it with the LN evangelists on twitter/telegram and see what they were up to. My curiosity often leads me to filthy places what can I say?

I shan't bore folks with the details of all the services and things I tried but here's the tl;dr:

How much of the network is actually using Lightning? Statistics site 1ml.com shows that there are currently around 4595 BTC in LN channels, or about 0.0219% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist. Indeed it's still a micro economy at this stage of development and from my perspective is just an ouroboros, as mentioned above.

And thus ends my participation in the Lightning experiment - I'll just stick to actual Bitcoin (address in footer if you are so inclined!) for now, thank you very much. I've deleted all LN apps from my device that were used during this exercise but on the off-chance someone happens to send me something on Telegram, I'll likely automatically send it back. You probably need that ten cents more than me.

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that some folx refuse to read the links in this piece and would rather make angry NPC noises instead. I'll break out the crayons for these people. Here's a simple flowchart:

That's all folks!

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Fiat

Ana Vidovic - Recuerdos de la Alhambra

July 14, 2022 — shinohai

Here's a video of a great performance of Recuerdos de la Alhambra so I can test my peering with scoopbot on pestnet.

Tags: News, Music, Warez

Adventures in pest testnet - Blatta updates and bots

March 12, 2022 — shinohai

Thimbronion (WoT:thimbronion) published several vpatches for blatta containing some bug fixes and client enhancements. I am currently running version 9978 and so far haven't found any bugs.

Getting an irc bot working on pestnet has caused me a bit of issue up to this point - mainly because I hadn't time to sit down and consider the problem well. Various attempts to get my old reliable busybot connected and responding to commands ended with the output not making it to the channel or user that requested it. I had almost decided making a bot using weechat was the only temporary solution but then PeterL (WoT:PeterL), whilst trying to connect scoopbot, mentioned something about regex which got me thinking about writing one for busybot. So I fired off a netcat listener, captured some input (thanks jonsykkel!), and in the wee hours finally got the bot to behave. I feel confident with a few hours more of cleanup busybot will be back in action full time.

The bot testing was performed using the blatta version above as the station. Once the aforementioned cleanup is done I plan to test the bot using jonsykkel's (WoT:jonsykkel) smalpest also.

Current #pest logs HERE

Tags: News, Linux, Pest

Adventures in pest testnet - connecting an Android device

January 27, 2022 — shinohai

A few months ago I published a piece documenting how to set up a gentoo chroot using termux. Since that makes python2.7 available, why not try and connect it to pest testnet?

I promptly set about installing thimbronion: 's blatta by uploading a tarball of it via the phone's sd card. I took the liberty of stripping it down a bit a renaming the main executable "parazit" for this test simply so I could readily distinguish the station on my local network. From within the pest directory I made a startup script with the following contents:


python2.7 parazit \
--log-level debug \
--udp-port=7778 \
--address-table-path=config.py \
--motd=motd

I then run the startup script inside a screen session. Once the station is running in the background I then connect via weechat.

You can also echo text to your weechat fifo like so:

echo 'irc.parazit.#pest *test message from cli' > ~/.weechat/weechat_fifo

At the time of this post the pest station has been running for well over 24 hours with no noticeable affect on the battery or cpu usage. Future experiments may involve sticking this device in a purse and seeing how the station connects outside the local network.

Tags: News, Linux, Pest

Installing slimv using esthlos-v

December 30, 2021 — shinohai

Slimv stands for Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Vim. It is a Vim plugin of 2009 vintage written by Tamas Kovacs, preserved in the form of a vpatch. This is for folx who already have vim,tmux, and sbcl installed and want a quick and reliable method for enabling a swank server in vim ala emacs.

Populate your slimv tree, mine is available at http://btc.info.gf/devel/vim/plugins/slimv/

# tree slimv/
slimv/
├── patches
│   └── slimv.genesis.vpatch
├── seals
│   └── slimv.genesis.vpatch.shinohai.sig
└── wot
    └── shinohai.asc

Using esthlos-v press slimv directly to the vim plugins directory:

`v press slimv.genesis.vpatch ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start/`

My sbcl binary is in a nonstandard location (because Gentoo) and I couldn't get the swank server to start from within vim. I remedied this with a function that starts swank in a tmux window using rlwrap:

swank() {
tmux ls | grep '>_' > /dev/null || (
  tmux new-session -d -s '>_' -n '[swank]' rlwrap /usr/local/bin/sbcl --load \
   ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start/slimv/slime/start-swank.lisp
)
exec tmux attach -t '>_'
}

Now when I open a `.lisp` file, vim presents me with a new buffer containing a REPL connected via swank:

BUT WAIT ! THERE'S MOAR !!!

Bundled with slimv is a tool called paredit which will, amongst other things,match parenthesis for you as you code. To learn more about it's features read the documentation by entering `:help paredit`

Tags: News, Lisp, Linux

Source deed for gnupg-1.4.10

December 25, 2021 — shinohai

This is a mirror of Mircea Popescu's deedbot deed of gnupg-1.4.10. I had someone ask me where this was located recently, and also saw it referenced in the irc logs so figured it might be useful to post it up along with my method of extracting it:

curl -Os4SL http://btc.info.gf/gpg/deeds/deed-378272-1.txt && \
cat deed-378272-1.txt | awk '/future./{flag=1;next}/BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE/{flag=0}flag'|base64 -d >gpg-1.4.10.tar.gz && \
tar zxvf gpg-1.4.10.tar.gz

The sources from this method are what yours truly uses for his static gpg build with musl, but these sources should build in the traditional way for less experienced users.

Tags: News, Cryptography, Linux

Viewing Pest testnet logs using tmux and weechat

December 24, 2021 — shinohai

This is a simple method of viewing your channel logs in weechat. It can be adapted to also display your znc logs as well. I find this method a much easier way of reviewing channel logs than fiddling with logbot configs, and requires limited resources if one is running pest on a headless machine.

/alias add log /eval /exec -bg tmux new-window -n '[logs]' \ sh -c "less +G $(echo ~/.weechat/logs/${buffer.full_name}.weechatlog | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')"

Now you can view the weechat logs for any chan by running `/log` in the current buffer. This will open the log in a new tmux window like so, and you can also scroll to your heart's content:

I am also pleased to report that jonsykkel's smalpest in C builds flawlessly, but sadly does not play nicely with blatta instances, so it remains lab use only for now.

Tags: News, Linux, Pest

Monday morning lulzmine, Rusty CoC edition

November 22, 2021 — shinohai

You know it's gonna be a great week when you wake up to HN hissyfits from the "Rust Programming language community". The entire "mod team" has apparently quit the project because they did not like the way their CoC was being swallowed. From the logs:

asciilifeform: meanwhile, in heathen oddities. shinohai: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-11-22#1067142 << Daddy doesn't like our CoC so we're gonna whine until everyone is forced to swallow OUR CoC!!!!! dulapbot: Logged on 2021-11-22 12:22:30 asciilifeform: meanwhile, in heathen oddities. shinohai: omfg hipsterlang folks are so fucking insufferable. asciilifeform would ask 'why do they have both a 'core team' and a 'mod team'' but can guess the answr shinohai: Silly, how else they gonna manufacture the CoC's ? signpost: lol shinohai: `git push origin yes-massa-dun-beat-me-massa` signpost: the way they want to be hurt, yet to be told to be hurt is power, is sordid. signpost: perhaps the final form of the stealing-the-stolen-from, that the victim screeches for moar. signpost: these people are an affront to humanity. asciilifeform: signpost: which people, in this case ? signpost: the bitch who is "resigning" and telling the folks who ignored his auctoritah how to fix themselves signpost: and also the "core team" who allowed the fungus to grow in the first place. asciilifeform: signpost: iirc the whole 'rust' thing is a fungus (crackpot reimpl. of some % of ada w/ 'modern' syntax, iirc) signpost: yep, growing out of the social arrangement on display here asciilifeform: lulzy signpost: what was mp's thing, the "two subbies arguing over who will top today" signpost: pretty spot on.

None of these people are in my WoT, so none of them actually matter and thus we continue on with our week.

Tags: News, Lulz

Lab notes: Pest and Alcuin part two

November 07, 2021 — shinohai

Since the last installment there has been updates made to Alcuin, including a rename to Blatta along with a genesis.vpatch for the same, and more recently some bugfixes which I successfully applied and will be testing in the coming week.

So far in testing I have been able to:

  • Set up a testnet on localhost.
  • Peer with Blatta's creator remotely and pass messages.
  • Connect an ircbot using it's own station.1

Interest seems to be brewing in the project, so I hope to grow my WoT for this item and look forward to posting more about this item as work progresses.

Read more...

Lab notes: Pest and Alcuin part one

October 19, 2021 — shinohai

Pest is, as defined in the draft spec:

a peer-to-peer network protocol intended for IRC-style chat. It is designed for decentralization of control, resistance to natural and artificial interference, and fits-in-head mechanical simplicity -- in that order.

The fall of TMSR and the subsequent fleanode collapse has evidently provided the catalyst to get the ball rolling on a replacement communications system that doesn't leave the user at the mercy of SJW's or fiat government stooges and other central points of failure. Discussion on the pest spec has been under way in dulapnet irc ever since asciilifeform first published the draft spec in September of this year, and yours truly has just now had time to carve out a bit of time to review the spec, chatlogs, and thimbronion's implementation of the pest spec in Python, known as Alcuin.

Weechat is my preferred irc client, and a few days ago in the logs thimbronion reported that weechat and some other clients would not send custom commands to the server. After looking into this a bit, I discovered weechat will send nonstandard commands to a connected server when prefixed with the `/quote` command. Even further digging into client behavior revealed that this behavior can be modified by simply changing a setting weechat has turned off by default:

/set irc.network.send_unknown_commands on

After setting the above the Alcuin server seemed to process commands exactly as it should, though much work remains to implement the entire spec (as stated in the author's README file). After setting up Python 2.7 on a remote machine and obtaining the script to generate keys from thimbronion, I was able to set up two pest stations and interact between them.

To help make it easier to test and experiment with Alcuin, I have produced a temporary genesis vpatch and sig based on thimbronion's version 9994 tarball and containing the missing key generation script mentioned previously. I will make every effort to keep this updated as the project progresses.

To be continued .....

Tags: News, Linux, Tools

Meme Collection Vol. 2 - Bitcoin Blinding Lights

August 06, 2021 — shinohai

"Bitcoin Blinding Lights", by Strike meme warfare specialist ICOffender.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Memetards, Lulz

Meme Collection Vol. 1 - The memetards

August 04, 2021 — shinohai

"The Memetards", an A-Team parody video starring Adam Back.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Memetards, Lulz

Suckless st and tabbed

July 15, 2021 — shinohai

In my quest to vpatch more things that I use regularly, I finally made a section on this site for my collection of suckless tools. While urxvt served me well for some time, it grows more and more into a bloated mess every update for so simple an item as a virtual terminal. st + tabbed combined have far fewer lines of code, is all in C, and with a few tweaks mimics all the good functionalities I need.

The st vpatch is vanilla st with the scrollback patches and externalpipe patch applied so I get a clean genesis starting point, and tabbed is the one found at suckless.org but modified slightly to allow allow renaming of open tabs (more on that below).

Both items are pressed in the usual way using your preferred implementation of V. The `config.h.def` file can be adjusted further to operator preferences before building with `make`.

After the items are installed to your path, a couple of bash functions can be added to one's aliases to ease tabbed terminal startup and renaming of tabs:

function term() {
xid="$(tabbed -c -d -s -r 2 st -w x)"
st -w "$xid" bash &
}
function set-title() {
  if [[ -z "$ORIG" ]]; then
    ORIG=$PS1
  fi
  TITLE="\[\e]2;$*\a\]"
  PS1=${ORIG}${TITLE}
}

Now I have an easy way to open a tabbed terminal and quickly rename tabs to organize work. For me, it looks something like this:

These items can now be found here:

st vpatch and seals

tabbed vpatch and seals

Tags: News, Linux, Tools

Moscow Memetards Move Market

July 10, 2021 — shinohai

In a decisive blow against mainstream media mongoloids chattering away at computers Twitter meme group member @gegelsmr, identifying as the "Israel Investment Fund Group", posted a tweet Friday afternoon announcing 2.3 Billion petrodollars worth of Bitcoin holdings. The tweet, spread by memetards, landed on the pages of Yahoo finance and other "cryptocurrency news outlets" within hours. Upon realizing they forgot to "Verify, don't trust" the butthurt rage resulted in the Israel Investment Fund Group account being suspended by twitter, likely because they hate competition on the dissemination of fake news front.

Because the internet never forgets, these lulz will be forever preserved:

https://archive.is/0V4Yu (The original tweet)

https://archive.is/2KroC (Yahoo news article)

https://archive.is/qg1Rl (Bitcoin Insider)

https://archive.is/7gZT5 (Crypto Watch Daily)

The Bitcoin market sank to $32,000 on Thursday and was trading at $33,900 at the time this post was published.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Memetards, Lulz

McAfee fakes death to avoid eating his penis

June 24, 2021 — shinohai

Serial shitcoin adventurer John McAfee was reportedly found dead in his Spanish prison cell just hours after USSA authorities were granted a request for his extradition. A lone letter `Q` was posted to his Instagram page hours after his death was reported, instead of the more appropriate `HFSP` which his surviving family is likely to experience if the disclosure is proven to be accurate.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Shitcoins

trb - correct trivial bug in `dumpblock`

June 21, 2021 — shinohai

As discussed in the #asciilifeform irc chan, a bug was discovered by user whaack (WoT:whaack) in the trb `dumpblock` mechanism where it would return an orphaned block from disk instead of the expected mainchain block. asciilifeform (WoT:asciilifeform) quickly produced a vpatch which corrects this behavior, which I have tested and signed.

The vpatch and it's corresponding signature can be found in the trb section below:

asciilifeform_dumpblocks_force_mainchain.kv.vpatch asciilifeform_dumpblocks_force_mainchain.kv.vpatch.shinohai.sig

Tags: News, Bitcoin

Gentoo chroot on android 10 device

June 06, 2021 — shinohai

I was in a pinch over the weekend and needed a quick gentoo env to test something but only had my stupid android 10 smartphone with me, so wat do? I'm documenting the following recipe that (so far) works for me and preserving the tarball here to my www for possible future needs.

Grab the stage3 for armv7 using curl inside termux.

`curl -sSL4 http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/arm/android/stage3-arm64-20200704.tar.xz`

Gotta fucking fix hardlinks cuz of some android kernel herpderpery so we use proot, also from termux.

`proot --link2symlink tar -C $GENTOO/data -xf stage3-arm64-20200704.tar.xz`

Now make a script that starts up the chroot inside termux and fire it off:

`cat >chroot.sh << EOF #!/usr/bin/env bash set -eu set -o pipefail unset LD_PRELOAD export GENTOO=/data/data/com.termux/gentoo export EPREFIX=/data/gentoo64 proot --link2symlink -r $GENTOO -0 -w / \ -b /dev -b /proc -b /sys \ $EPREFIX/bin/sh -c \ "HOME=$EPREFIX/root $EPREFIX/startprefix" EOF chmod +x chroot.sh sh chroot.sh

Now from inside the chroot, fix your `/etc/resolv.conf` since this can't be copied from android system. Then source your profile and set ENV.

source /etc/profile export PS1="(chroot) $PS1"

Normally this is the step where one sets up portage, but resist the temptation to `emerge-webrsync` here. I'd simply crossdev the packages I needed on a much more capable machine and set up my `/etc/portage/make.conf` to emerge packages from a local binhost.

CAVEATS

This thing will bitch about `proc/` not being mounted on most devices. However, I'm able to see chroot processes inside htop in another termux session.

Because of the extreme minimal size of the environment, user is expected to be capable of building their own env using crossdev as explained above

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that I mounted one of these Kingston 8GB microsd cards before unpacking the fs:

Tags: News, Gentoo, Linux

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections: Laura Loomer crashes the party.

June 05, 2021 — shinohai

US Republican activist Laura Loomer started the first day of the 2021 Miami "Bitcoin" conference off with a bang, interrupting the panelist in order to raise objections to him championing Bitcoin as an instrument of freedom, whilst simultaneously accusing him of censorship and election interference on twitter. Event organizers regained control of the room by pinning a gold star on Ms. Loomer, and Jack Dorsey went on to talk about his new hardware "Bitcoin" wallet offering. The "assisted custody" device will include a signing key for Square to prevent users from using actual Bitcoin. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, BitcoinMiami2021

El Salvador declares Bitcoin offical currency

June 05, 2021 — shinohai

Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, announced via recorded message played at the Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami that next week he will be sending a bill to congress making BTC official legal tender within the country. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, BitcoinMiami2021

warez addition 'calc' sim

May 16, 2021 — shinohai

After recovering from my initial shock of finding something useful on "Hacker" "News", I immediately set about cloning this lightweight calculator sim for future hacks.

Now available in my warez section, you can try this handy tool here: [CALC].

That is all.

Tags: News, Math, Python, Linux

Spring projects I: Gentoo distfiles mirror.

February 03, 2021 — shinohai

One of the more useful items I had not gotten around to mirroring is asciilifeform's historic Gentoo distfiles which is, as far as I can tell, possibly one of the only places on the internet to get these. These will now live here: http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/.

The Gentoo section of this www has suffered from a bit of neglect over the past year, and this is something I hope to remedy by this Summer. Possible upgrades will include a collection of guides for various boards, mirrors of historic .iso's (which also are getting harder to locate) and addition of various musl patches I have scattered about from past experiments.

Tags: News, Gentoo, Linux

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections 6

January 30, 2021 — shinohai

It's been a while since I've done one of these, but this past week produced a bit of lulzy shitcoin fodder so here goes.

From around teh interwebz:

A now-deleted tweet from the account "@DocumentingBTC" suggested that one should buy Bitcoin because the "founder of reddit" is doing it.

The reader should be well-advised to not emulate Alexis Ohanian in any shape or form, unless you aspire to have fun staying poor. Alexis famously quit his job so a black person could have it and will likely take any Bitcoin he has and pay slavery reparations or other woke nonsense with it.

The denizens of reddit also showed us what happens when one turd squeezes another with the Robinhood lulz this week:

How it started:

How it's going:

Using tactics learned from the 2016 DAO hack, Robinhood execs decided to stop trading on certain shares though no SFYL is expected to occur from the riots. USGoogle was happy to assist in these efforts and deleted 100K+ 1-star ratings of the trading app in it's store.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

ben_vulpes base58 encoding in Common Lisp

January 24, 2021 — shinohai

As the anniversary of the fall of TMSR approaches the decay of the once-proud institution is evident in the rapidly decreasing number of websites of former Lords. cascadianhacker.com, formerly operated by ben_vulpes (WoT:ben_vulpes) is sadly one of these castles specifically because the guy wrote the defacto introduction to vtronics (archived) and some interesting posts on common lisp.

One forgotten item I found particularly useful was an implementation of base58 encoding in common lisp. Sadly I could find no archive of the original article but after a bit of digging I found a copy of the code contained within saved on an old hard drive. I'm quoting it below so I have a handy reference for future projects.

(defparameter +b58-alphabet+ "123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz")

(defun b58-encode (bytes)
  (let ((string (make-string-output-stream))
        (bignum (loop for i to (- (length bytes) 1) summing
               (* (elt bytes i)
                  (expt 256 i)))))

   (loop while (> bignum 0) do
        (multiple-value-bind (x r) (floor bignum (length +b58-alphabet+))
          (write-char (elt +b58-alphabet+ r) string)
          (setf bignum x)))

   (loop for b across (reverse bytes) do
        (if (= 0 b)
            (write-char (elt +b58-alphabet+ 0) string)
            (return)))

   (reverse (get-output-stream-string string))))

Tags: Bitcoin, Lisp, News

Hoaxtoshi and Ayre ring in 2021 with fresh round of lies.

January 21, 2021 — shinohai

In a continuation of the lulz from last year, liar and Hoaxtoshi Craig Wright (WoT:non-entity) is sending copyright claims to persons publishing the original Bitcoin whitepaper, in an attempt to use non-sovereign courts to attack sovereign Bitcoin. Notices were sent to the bitcoincore.org and bitcoin.org website from lawyers representing Hoaxtoshi, with demands that any copies be immediately removed on copyright infringement grounds. While "bitcoincore.org" decided to capitulate to the ludicrous demands, the owners of the "bitcoin.org" website published the following statement: (archived)

Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright. In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. They also claim he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the original owner of bitcoin.org. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were both asked to take down the whitepaper. We believe these claims are without merit, and refuse to do so. Unfortunately, without consulting us, Bitcoin Core developers scrambled to remove the Bitcoin whitepaper from bitcoincore.org, in response to these allegations of copyright infringement, lending credence to these false claims. The Bitcoin Core website was modified to remove references to the whitepaper, their local copy of the whitepaper PDF was deleted, and with less than 2 hours of public review, this change was merged. By surrendering in this way, the Bitcoin Core project has lent ammunition to Bitcoin’s enemies, engaged in self-censorship, and compromised its integrity. This surrender will no doubt be weaponized to make new false claims, like that the Bitcoin Core developers “know” CSW to be Satoshi Nakamoto and this is why they acted in this way. The Bitcoin whitepaper was included in the original Bitcoin project files with the project clearly published under the MIT license by Satoshi Nakamoto. We believe there is no doubt we have the legal right to host the Bitcoin whitepaper. Furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto has a known PGP public key, therefore it is cryptographically possible for someone to verify themselves to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Unfortunately, Craig has been unable to do this. We will continue hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper and won’t be silenced or intimidated. Others hosting the whitepaper should follow our lead in resisting these false allegations.

Users of actual Bitcoin are, as always, immune to this sort of thing. The whitepaper is included in the trb archives here.

Tags: Bitcoin, Lulz, News

Mirror updates for FFA

January 20, 2021 — shinohai

I have updated the mirror of asciilifeform's ffa to include the latest updates from loperos. Hopefully I will be able to resume more in-depth study of ffa in the coming weeks and can continue adding my own seals to the mix.

As handy reference, the following is the current Table of Contents for ffa as it stands currently, with corresponding links to loperos. I intend to mirror these articles here on site this spring as time permits.

Tags: News, Cryptography

trb project and mirror updates

December 22, 2020 — shinohai

Discussion in #therealbitcoin channel on irc has shamed me into updating my trb mirror with the obey_sendbuffersize.vpatch. I had previously tested and signed while reviewing the patch with mod6 (WoT:mod6)this past Summer, but I decided to err on side of caution and do a few builds and runs before publishing. The vpatch and it's corresponding seal are now available on my trb mirror:

obey_sendbuffersize.vpatch

obey_sendbuffersize.vpatch.shinohai.sig

Current state of The Bitcoin Foundation and other ramblings:

The source code viewer remains down at the time this post was being written.

No monthly tbf "State of Bitcoin" address or treasury reports have been broadcast since August.

asciilifeform (WoT:asciilifeform) floats the possibility of yours truly becoming co-chair of The Bitcoin Foundation, and a slew of improvements.

Annnnd that's pretty much all for now. I will make any updates to the information here in a future post. Stay tuned.

Tags: Bitcoin, News

A mirror of therealbitcoin.org

October 16, 2020 — shinohai

A recent outage of the Bitcoin foundation website made me think it might be a good idea to mirror the contents in the event another outage occurs due to unforeseen circumstances or cosmic rays". The complete site mirror will reside at http://btc.info.gf/mirrors/therealbitcoin.org and every effort will be made to keep it regularly updated. Enjoy!

Tags: News, Bitcoin

More than sixty Coinbase employees exit after apolitics rule takes effect

October 11, 2020 — shinohai

Conbase CEO Brian Armstrong (WoT:nonperson) has said that more than 60 employees (~5%) accepted the "company's" severance package that was proffered in a recent announcement the exchange made to remain neutral regarding political affairs in the USSA. The controversial move by Coinbase produced the usual SJW outrage across their preferred platforms of Reddit and "Hacker News", with much weeping and gnashing of teeth occurring over their lost ability to spread Marxism further in the workplace. The disenfranchised employees will likely seek employment in more SJW friendly environs like Shithub, where they are free to focus on "things that excite them" like removing racially charged language from computer programs and embedding more equality into silicon. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Don't call me

October 02, 2020 — shinohai

When I left tmsr early in 2018, I had the idea that I would poke about in the sewers and hang out my plaque as a freelance "core" cryptocurrency developer. I thought it would at least be a fun way to sharpen my skills and understanding of the "ecosystem" in general, but two years on into the fray I'm not certain I really like what I see.

The above-mentioned ecosystem is full of people who want you to spend hours of your time polishing turds for little or no money. Lane Rettig, a mETHereum dev, hit the nail on the head about what one should expect as a "core" dev for any cryptocurrency:

You’re building extremely low-level infrastructure that the average person will never notice nor understand .... The pay kinda sucks, other people will get rich and famous on the back of your work, you likely won’t receive any credit, and you kind of have to be okay with that.

I'm decidedly not ok with that. I'm tired of watching retards throw insane amounts of Bitcoin at "exchange listings" and javascript developers who write webshit and get paid 10x the amount a "core developer" is expected to accept. I'm tired of building toolchains for obscure machines - which can take hours on it's own - then spend days afterwards getting shitty code I inherited to build in a halfway sane manner. I'm tired of being available 100% of the time to answer questions and walk people through technical things, most of the time without even a simple thank you or a courtesy bitcent for my trouble. I'm also tired of watching myself give people microscopes to hammer nails with. The list could go on all night.

In short, I've had about enough of the "cryptocurrency community" and am seriously considering just sitting back and watching the whole thing burn. And make no mistake - fires will break out and when they do perhaps there is a monkey out there willing to work for peanuts or nothing at all.

Whatever the case, don't call me. </rant>

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

The caek is a lie

August 22, 2020 — shinohai

IRC log review

A few interesting and not-so-interesting things in freenode irc.

Still nothing of substance out of #o, low signal.

#o alumni whaack (WoT:whaack) is still working on his trb node however, and according to watchglass is at block height 448752.

btcinfobot caused me to walk away in disgust this past week and instead spend the day fishing. After a refreshing day at the river it is now back online and, freenode weather permitting, will remain there for testing. ircbot and logbot are stable, but quest for lispbot command interpreter vpatch continues.

Meanwhile, in #asciilifeform mats (WoT:mats) proffers original fg units for the low price of $100 in Bitcoin.

ave1 (WoT:ave1) officially goes mia as ave1.org goes dark.

trinque (WoT:trinque) continues quest to get vgenesis of linux before it becomes too cancerous.

Otherwise, it's a rainy afternoon in castle shinohai and the caek is a lie.

Tags: News, Bitcoin

Deedbot Web of Trust updates - Summer 2020

June 26, 2020 — shinohai

I finally got around to tidying up my WOT on deedbot, so this page will serve as any easy reference of persons I have rated in my WoT. It is an exact mirror of the ratings table found on deedbot here.

Ratings Received
Rating From Timestamp Note
5 spyked 2020-05-26 02:05:28 botworks; qntra; shitcoins
3 BingoBoingo 2016-12-11 03:12:34 Regular Qntra Contributor and TRB-ist
3 asciilifeform 2018-01-24 11:01:20 heathendom newsdesk; pogotronics, trb, FG experimenter
2 billymg 2020-04-26 10:04:36 longstanding #trilema member from before my time. former qntra contributor with a good sense of humor. writes at btc.info.gf/blog
2 danielpbarron 2017-01-23 10:01:50 Puts in the work
2 hanbot 2016-12-24 11:12:23 Avid task tackler.
2 mod6 2015-07-03 03:07:00 Very responsive and helpful testing of TRB & V.
2 pete_dushenski 2016-06-29 10:06:34 trb tester+navigator
1 ag3nt_zer0 2015-07-10 10:07:25 great assist to newb
1 diana_coman 2016-09-03 10:09:37 Held many euloran noob hands.
1 mats 2016-02-14 05:02:09 The Real Bitcoin tester, #b-a regular
1 mircea_popescu 2018-07-18 12:07:20 he used to be a bigshot.
1 whaack 2017-07-19 07:07:11 qntra writer, helped me a bit with my spanish pronunciation
Ratings Sent
Rating To Timestamp Note
5 asciilifeform 2020-06-19 08:06:38 #asciilifeform Writes at: loper-os.org ffa, fg, too much to mention
5 spyked 2020-06-19 08:06:55 #spyked Lisp,botworks, writes at http://thetarpit.org/
4 BingoBoingo 2020-06-19 08:06:42 #agriculturalsupremacy Writes at: http://bingology.net/ and http://mvdstandard.net/ Former Qntra editor.
2 billymg 2020-06-19 08:06:27 Writes at: http://billymg.com/
2 jurov 2020-06-19 08:06:43 #therealbitcoin Boldly continuing work of trb/thebitcoinfoundation. Writes at http://explo.yt/
2 trinque 2020-06-19 08:06:30 #trinque deedbot Writes at: http://trinque.org/ operates http://deedbot.org
2 whaack 2020-06-19 09:06:50 Common Lisp, Guitarrista Writes at: http://ztkfg.com/
1 adlai 2020-06-19 08:06:37 Can be found in #asciilifeform. Lisper that has published useful items.
1 danielpbarron 2018-04-05 08:04:11
1 diana_coman 2020-06-19 08:06:54 Reichsführer of The Most Cvasi Republic of #ossasepia, S.MG.
1 mats 2018-04-05 08:04:10
1 verisimilitude 2020-06-19 08:06:48 Writes at: http://verisimilitudes.net
-1 mircea_popescu 2020-06-19 08:06:37 Ozymandias, Scammed MPEX users despite his rationalizations to the contrary.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, WoT

Botworks - ircbot and logbot genesis

June 21, 2020 — shinohai

Alf has reminded me several times that it might be helpful to publish the sauce for my ircbot setup so this post is an attempt to do just that, and generally make it easier to install the bot components using V. My botworks tree uses trinque's lisp ircbot and logbot combo as the starting point.

A lot of good patches are scattered about on former republican blogs, though it seems I could get none of them to play nice with esthlos-v so a regrind was in order. For ircbot these are:

trinque's ircbot-genesis-kv.vpatch.

ben_vulpes' ircbot-multiple-channels-kv.vpatch.

whaack's ircbot-no-suicide-on-reconnect-kv.vpatch.

Assuming you already have SBCL and quicklisp, you can then use `V` to press ircbot and move the output to your local-projects directory:

v press ircbot-no-suicide-on-reconnect-kv out

mv out/ircbot ~/quicklisp/local-projects

The process is repeated to add the logbot system. While testing the regrinds I came upon a curious problem where adding ben_vulpes "logbot-multiple-channels" patch caused an error when trying to start logbot. Simply pressing the logbot genesis and running the bot is working, so I will continue to debug the issue and post results in a future botworks piece. The logbot requires that postgres be installed on your system, whaack has a good piece on how to do this on his blog, if you aren't familiar with setting that part up.

v press logbot-genesis-kv.vpatch

mv out/logbot ~/quicklisp/local-projects

With both of these components installed where ASDF can find them running the bot is as simple as firing up a REPL, adding your parameters and connecting to it according to the instructions in the "logbot/USAGE" file.

TODO:

Put together a better prefixed command system, the system I am currently using works but needs quite a bit of polish before being worthy of turning into a vpatch.

Cobble together a www log reader for use with the logbot system.

Links to useful lisp botworks resources:

trinque's sources: http://trinque.org/src/

ben_vulpes' post on multiple channels: http://cascadianhacker.com/correction-multiple-channel-patches-for-irclogbot

spyked's botworks vpatches: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/src/botworks/v/patches/

whaack's post on setting up trinque's logbot: http://ztkfg.com/2019/12/setting-up-trinques-logbot-on-centos-6-with-sbcl-quicklisp-swank-and-postgres/

Tags: News, Lisp, UNIX

USSA Report: Github gets blacked and pics from inside Veganzuela

June 15, 2020 — shinohai

Here are a few interesting items occurring in the United Socialist States of America this week.

Shithub announced they will be replacing the word "Master" as the name of the default branch name which they hope will help by "removing racially-charged language"1 from the open-sores platform. Github/Microshit "developer" Johannes Schindelin was quoted in the issue comments saying he was prepared to bow to his BLMasters:

"At this point, I don't think it matters what the intention behind the word is. It incites emotional distress. So we should move away from it."

Other useless "software developers" following suit include OpenSSL, Curl, and Powershell. (archived)

The Supreme Court ruled Monday afternoon that if you have employees that cosplay furries or someone of the opposite gender that you are stuck with them for the foreseeable future, so expect offense from the masses.

The Republic of Veganzuela inside Seattle is entering it's second week, even as US President Donald Trump threatened to https://archive.is/W984k restore "law and order" by dismantling the area surrendered by Seattle police. A white flag was not used in the surrender so as not to incite racial tensions.

Persons armed with AR-15's helpfully collect the $10 for black people tax upon entry.

Once inside, visitors are treated to sights such as lush gardens and the luxury accommodations that dot the landscape of this idyllic socialist paradise.

A separate piece will document any further activity in and around the Veganzuelan border.

Read more...

Yet another musl trb build instructional

April 30, 2020 — shinohai

A recent post by DC University alumni1jfw proposed significant changes to the trb build system amongst them one that does away with the `makefile.unix` file in trb source directory. This build takes a different tack and changes next to nothing of the original structure, while still getting a statically linked bitcoind.

I started by adding a profile for my toolchain at `/etc/env.d/gcc/` and named it "x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-musl-4.9.4". Now one can switch to it any time you please using gcc-config.

# gcc-config -l
 [1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-7.3.0
 [2] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-9.2.0
 [3] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-musl-4.9.4 *
<~snip~>

I choose profile 3, ensuring we use the correct toolchain.

# gcc -v
gcc version 4.9.4 20160426 (for GNAT GPL 2016 20160515) (GCC)

Press trb in the same way as described on existing foundation "how-to" page, then proceed to the build directory:

v press mod6_whogaveblox trb054`
`cd trb054/bitcoin/build`

Build the 3 main trb dependencies (listed as #Turds! in rotor ), much as Jacob described in his article, and installed them to the `./ourlibs` directory. I also host my own mirror the dependency artifacts on deebot here so I grabbed the necessary items:

boost_1_52_0.tar.bz2

openssl-1.0.1g.tar.gz

db-4.8.30.tar.gz

In this directory I also put a modified version of the "rotor_bitcoin_only" script called `build.sh` that absolutely, positively *does not remove* makefile.unix. It contains:

#!/bin/sh

######################################
#Turds!
OPENSSL=openssl-1.0.1g
BDB=db-4.8.30
BOOST=boost_1_52_0
######################################
TOOLCHAIN="/usr/local/x86_64-linux-musl/"
DIST=$(readlink -f ./distfiles)
OURLIBS=$(readlink -f ./ourlibs)

#TOOLCHAIN
export CC=$(readlink -f $TOOLCHAIN/bin/x86_64-linux-musl-gcc)
export CXX=$(readlink -f $TOOLCHAIN/bin/x86_64-linux-musl-g++)
export LD=$(readlink -f $TOOLCHAIN/bin/x86_64-linux-musl-ld)

export CFLAGS=-I$(readlink -f $TOOLCHAIN/usr/include)
export LDFLAGS=-L$(readlink -f .$TOOLCHAIN/usr/lib)
export PATH=$PATH:$(readlink -f $TOOLCHAIN/usr/bin)

#LIBS
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_PATH=$OURLIBS/include
export OPENSSL_LIB_PATH=$OURLIBS/lib

export BDB_INCLUDE_PATH=$OURLIBS/include
export BDB_LIB_PATH=$OURLIBS/lib

export BOOST_INCLUDE_PATH=$OURLIBS/include
export BOOST_LIB_PATH=$OURLIBS/lib

cd ../src;
make STATIC=all -f makefile.unix bitcoind
strip bitcoind
mv bitcoind ../bin

Now run `./build.sh The output for me is a 5M statically linked trb. It took about ten minutes for me to build.

bitcoin/bin # file bitcoind
bitcoind: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped

bitcoin/bin # echo "Size: $(du -h bitcoind)-$(ldd bitcoind)"
Size: 5.0M	bitcoind-	not a dynamic executable

I am pleased with the results as they are on this one. Aside from the benefit of losing the tedious buildroot process, I'm choosing not to change much right now here and leave trb the fuck alone.2

Read more...

WIP: A static GNAT with musl, NoSuchLabs Edition.

April 26, 2020 — shinohai

A discussion in the #asciilifeform irc chan earlier this month revealed that many of the original Adacore mirrors for building GNAT no longer resolve. A fellow named jfw undertook the task of mirroring the necessary items, and wrote about the process on his blog, which is well worth a read. To further help preserve these items, asciilifeform was kind enough to upload them to his website (along with a handy archive of Gentoo distfiles - but that is fodder for another post).

The above bitrot problem means that building ave1's musl GNAT suite as it exists no longer works, so I decided to attempt replacing the broken links in the build scripts with the working set from NoSuchLabs. For interested parties I have mirrored ave1's tarball HERE and a patch with the current bare-minimum link changes to get it working HERE. This item is a WIP, so I haven't yet replaced 100% of the original links, but readers are invited to join #asciilifeform on freenode irc to complain and/or suggest ways to improve it.

After applying the patch, following the build instructions in ave1's README file should produce a static GNAT and GCC-4.9.4 toolchain, perfect for use with FFA and other goodies. I will update this post as changes are made to the build scripts.

Tags: News, Ada, UNIX

Experimental vpatches for trb

April 19, 2020 — shinohai

I have decided that my trb mirror could use an experimental patch section as a place to aggregate vpatches I have found useful over time, but aren't part of the "official" trb tree. I have serious reservations as to how much longer btcbase will exist - If the end of TMSR and the Qntra exit scam is any indication, it might be best to grab these items while the getting is good.

The first item in this section doesn't herald from btcbase however, but from Jacob Welsh's Fixpoint blog. This experimental patch adds a "getrawtransaction" rpc call. The only issue I had in applying this patch was due to differences in naming styles of the manifest file, so the item I include here is reground with a note in the manifest that jfw is the original author along with an update of the block time. It should be noted that the patch does not have a corresponding seal at this time, making it a "use at own discretion" item. The bitcoin_getrawtransaction.vpatch can be found HERE.

That'd be it for now. Future updates to the experimental section will likely include a regrind of asciilifeform's "Shiva" and polarbeard's "sendrawtransaction" vpatches, as those are the items I am most familiar with.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, UNIX

tgbot - a Telegram bot in Bash

March 14, 2020 — shinohai

tgbot is, as the title says, a extensible Telegram bot written in Bash. It is what telegram-bot-bash was originally supposed to be before it became a bloated clusterfuck.

But why Bash? Because it's everywhere. This bot is mainly useful for folks that want to quickly set up a bot to automate tasks or announce rss feeds in a Telegram group. This functionality isn't included in this vpatch, but instead the user is invited to write their own commands and functions. Examples are included in the "commands" script.

To use:

Grab the vpatch and seal from here and press using a keccak-based vtron.

Make the following files executable:

  • commands
  • global
  • sendNotify
  • JSON.sh
  • tgbot

Create a new bot by sending a message to @BotFather. After completing the creation steps, copy your token to the "token" file, and save with user-readable permissions.

Then start the bot in a tmux or screen session by simply running `./tgbot`. The bot writes it's logfile to "logfile.txt" in the directory it is running in.

Don't:

Run this bot with root permissions, even if "just testing"! Telegram is a cesspool and you will quickly come to grief.

Otherwise, enjoy.

Tags: News, UNIX

Trilema announces closure

March 12, 2020 — shinohai

Mircea Popescu published a blog post earlier this morning announcing the end of "TMSR" activities on Trilema, presumably so he can focus his time on other important activities such as hippo training.

For some strange reason, the burning fires and attrition rates in the past few years reminded me of an excerpt by Mark Twain:

We played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned. All the boys did. We hadn’t robbed nobody, hadn’t killed any people, but only just pretended. We used to hop out of the woods and go charging down on hog-drivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market, but we never hived any of them. Tom Sawyer called the hogs “ingots,” and he called the turnips and stuff “julery,” and we would go to the cave and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed and marked. But I couldn’t see no profit in it. -Huckleberry Finn.

The future of other former TMSR endeavours, such as Qntra and Eulora, remain unclear at this time.

Tags: News, Lulz, TMSR

lam-par.sh genesis

March 10, 2020 — shinohai

This is a genesis vpatch for a bash script that takes all the functions of asciilifeform's lamport parachute and combines them into a single script for personal use.

(lam-par.genesis.kv.vpatch)
(lam-par.genesis.kv.vpatch.shinohai.sig)

Press using a keccak vtron of choice. Here I am using esthlos-v:

`v press lam-par.genesis.kv.vpatch lam-par/`

Change to the output directory, make the script executable, and run it:

lam-par # ./lam-par.sh --help
Options:

    --mkpriv     Generate a private key
    --priv2pub   Generate a public key from a private key
-s, --sign       Sign a message using your public key
-v, --verify     Verify a signed message using a public key

See http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1762 for more details

Tags: News, Cryptography, UNIX

Robinhood falls along with other fiat markets

March 09, 2020 — shinohai

On the heels of a previous outage, robinhood customers reported widespread issues again this morning shortly after markets opened. Monday started off poorly for fiat markets, with reports of trading halts of 15 Minutes or more after the S&P 500 tanked 7% rapidly in early morning trading.

Meanwhile at MPEX storm clouds brew with some users hoping to get their coins off the exchange before the 2020 Lardship list is published.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Fiat, TMSR, Lulz

Spot the SFYL

March 06, 2020 — shinohai

Happy Friday afternoon. this week on the SFYL channel we present the following (compressed) image of some derp from twitter showing off his new "secure" Nano Ledger Bitcoin wallet.

Simon the smacktard forgot, however, to obscure the paper containing his device's seed phrase, conveniently demonstrating that some people just aren't ready to use Bitcoin yet. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Insecurity, Lulz

Robinhood trading outage enters second day

March 03, 2020 — shinohai

Users of "Cryptocurrency" and fiat stock trading platform Robinhood reported widespread outages beginning on Monday, and is still operating intermittently at the time of this post. The ill timed bug, which some users reported may be attributed to forgetting to code in leap-year logic, occurred just as markets began a recovery from novel coronavirus fears.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Let's encrypt announces pwn of 1 billion certs

February 28, 2020 — shinohai

Snake-oil salesman Let's Encrypt announced in a blog post earlier this week that they had issued 1 billion certificates since the company's creation in late 2014. The dubious milestone seems to indicate that potentially millions of websites are OK with having their "encrypted traffic" revealed by an entity that controls the system's master keys.

Tags: News, Cryptography, Lulz

trb mirror updates and build notes

February 26, 2020 — shinohai

The Bitcoin Foundation chairman mod6 recently published some new vpatches and added them to the foundation's website for testing. I haven't updated my personal mirror here on btcinfo in some time, at least since the Keccak regrind so this post will serve to do precisely that, and provide updated build instructions and notes.

Though mod6's post only mentions 3 vpatches, there are a total of 5 new vpatches that we will be adding to the trb mirror, as the last updated patch here was "asciilifeform_aggressive_pushgetblocks.vpatch". These vpatches are (listed in press order):

  • mod6_privkey_tools.vpatch
  • mod6_manifest.vpatch
  • mod6_phexdigit_fix.vpatch
  • mod6_excise_hash_truncation.vpatch
  • mod6_whogaveblox.vpatch

In order to press and build trb you will need a Keccak vtron, for these tests I used esthlos-v. The Bitcoin Foundation also has an alternative "how to" using another vtron version here. I am using the "OFFLINE" build instructions because I host my own dependency mirror and am using that.

My normal development and testing laptop is down at the time of writing, so I used my "daily driver" Gentoo computer when testing, which is unfortunately cursed with glibc-2.28. Though the initial press went fine, I quickly hit a wall during the buildroot step and got the following error:

freadahead.c: In function 'freadahead':
freadahead.c:91:3: error: #error "Please port gnulib freadahead.c to your platform! Look at the definition of 
fflush, fread, ungetc on your system, then report this to bug-gnulib."
  #error "Please port gnulib freadahead.c to your platform! Look at the definition of 
fflush, fread, ungetc on your system, then report this to bug-gnulib."
   ^
make[6]: *** [Makefile:1842: freadahead.o] Error 1
make[6]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
In file included from fseeko.c:17:0:
./config.h:78:0: warning: "_FORTIFY_SOURCE" redefined
    # define _FORTIFY_SOURCE 2
 ^
: note: this is the location of the previous definition
fseeko.c: In function 'rpl_fseeko':
fseeko.c:109:4: error: #error "Please port gnulib fseeko.c to your platform! Look at the code in fseeko.c, 
then report this to bug-gnulib."
   #error "Please port gnulib fseeko.c to your platform! Look at the code in fseeko.c, 
then report this to bug-gnulib."

My solution was to simply add a patch to `buildroot-2015.05/package/m4` and restart the build. While I can't recommend doing this under normal circumstances (rather, one should instead use a Linux that isn't cursed) I have uploaded the patch I used here for the sake of documentation and thoroughness.

After applying the above duct-tape, the build proceeded smoothly and spat out the usual static bitcoind. To recap, here are the steps:

  • Download the patches, seals, wot, and dependencies from my mirror.
  • Press using esthlos-v: `v press mod6_whogaveblox trb054`
  • Move the dependencies to the proper location: `mv deps/*.asc trb054/bitcoin/deps`
  • Change directories and build: `cd trb054/bitcoin && make`

With all the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the foundation in certain circles, it feels good to have a page where my particular build is made public and commented. For the most part trb is in a "leave it the fuck alone" state, though at some point I'd like to see some Common Lisp or scheme wallet functions added to the mix.

As always, the journey continues!

Tags: News, Bitcoin, UNIX

Pots, kettles, and monoculture.

February 10, 2020 — shinohai

Following my departure from Qntra part deux I wrote about last week, the inevitable opining of the editor on the situation appeared in his blog and was, sadly, precisely what I expected. I was accused of not being able to change, and well *that observation* is true, at least as far as the Republic Reich is concerned. You can ballyhoo about "hallucinated freedom" all day, but it means little when the despot proclaiming it is delusional themselves.

BingoBoingo was right about another point, nothing was lost in my departure. Putting my name on Qntra pieces has ho-hum effects, chiefly because Qntra is known to be associated with the aforementioned despot, and is likely the reason not even the crazies out there seem to be interested in writing for them.

I resumed posting lulzy shitcoin happenings here on btcinfo. Here are the numbers from reddit comparing a lulzy Qntra piece vs. a post here:

Power Rangers Pushing "Taproot" Into Their Bitcoin Network Client Fork 3 points (58% upvoted)

BSV bug leaves nodes unsure which scam chain to follow 47 points (89% upvoted)

The continuing saga of watching Rome burn will be reported on here. Enjoy.

Tags: News, Lulz, TMSR

BSV bug leaves nodes unsure which scam chain to follow

February 09, 2020 — shinohai

The Hoaxtoshi fork-of-a-fork, BitcoinSV, is reportedly connecting to BCash nodes due to a bug that automatically enters "safe mode" when it finds a longer but invalid chain. Aside from this lulzy revelation, twitter user Ben Verret also revealed:

"There are still at least two chains actively mined in BSV, it's a total mess."

Although Hoaxtoshi has claimed in the past to have knowledge of bugs that would "destroy Bitcoin", he was apparently unaware of these particular flaws in his own "BitcoinSV" implementation, since no one seemed to notice the bug existed since November 2018 when their fork went live. (archived)

Tags: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, News

You cannot enter the same river twice.

February 05, 2020 — shinohai

A little over a week ago after a discussion on irc with BingoBoingo, I decided to temporarily call a truce and submit some stories to Qntra again. So I set about trolling my rss feed for leads, submitted a few good stories (which BingoBoingo seemed to enjoy), and prepared to carve out a regular block of time daily to perhaps improve my writing and help "Make Qntra great again!".

Alas, my efforts did not last long as it is apparent no peace between myself and the faction calling themselves a Republic these days is possible. Emperor Caligula remains hell-bent on destroying everything with his madness, and I have better things to do with my time than waste words for an audience that cares not for my contributions. There is also the matter of financial compensation, which the editor assured me would be forthcoming but I cannot expect that there wouldn't be some sort of gypsy trick to avoid distributing my shares, having learned my lesson about accepting promisetronics as a form of payment some time ago.

In short, writing for Qntra appears to have about as much of a future as TMSR itself, as long as their leader refuses to perform any sort of introspection, and surrounds himself with knob-slobbing invertebrates that support such nonsense.

There is plenty left to do as Spring approaches V, ffa, and of course ongoing lulz which will, as always, continue to be reported on here.

Tags: News, TMSR, Lulz

Notes on esthlos-v and some restructuring thereof

January 30, 2020 — shinohai

This particular post will serve as a place to put my notes on esthlos-v, which I have been reading over in an attempt to polish it up for personal use. Now there are many fine implementations of "V" out there already, and I admit mod6's "v.pl" has served me well over time, but this particular "V" is delightfully readable and the code is well commented.

Way back in ancient Greece, the word "esthlos" meant that "something exists" or at least is true. Even though the author of esthlos-v vanished into internet space some time ago, and apparently abandoned work on the project, we'll retain the original name since it seems rather fitting for a tool used to magic software into existence.

I will expound upon the contents of esthlos-v in a later piece, though for now I am adding a single new vpatch: "esthlos-v_makefile-and-vdiff.vpatch" - this patch contains simple modifications to the original Makefile so it will build both "v.lisp" and "cl-keccak" as standalone binaries at the same time, and install them if the operator so desires. A modified version of phf's original vdiff.sh that uses cl-keccak instead of sha512sum is included. This vpatch and it's corresponding seal can be found in the esthlos-v mirror here.

Tags: News, Lisp, UNIX

Aria detta la Frescobalda

January 06, 2020 — shinohai

This is a clip of Andrés Segovia with student Oscar Ghiglia circa 1965, practicing "Aria detta la Frescobalda" by Girolamo Frescobaldi. To ensure webrot does not erode this classic video it will henceforth reside in the warez section.

Tags: News, Music, Warez

Mircea Popescu, or how to spread 500 words of liquishit and say nothing

November 21, 2019 — shinohai

About a week ago, I was merrily working on some bot things when this Qntra piece came through my rss feed. I couldn't resist the temptation to lampoon and/or stir the pot and decided to leave a single-sentence comment and wait for the fireworks:

shinohai says:
November 14, 2019 at 8:49 pm
They'll see the light and switch to writing farticles on mp-turdpress any day now.

A few days later, good 'ol botty gives me another rss ping containing the expected reply:

Mircea Popescu says:
November 16, 2019 at 9:40 am
No, shitface, they won't do that. What they'll do instead is join the chorus of cripple fucks 
whining about how nobody can accuse them of not being just like me.
You didn't invent that, you know. You're just some shitface-come-lately 
to the longest ongoing party in the history of the world, 
it was happening in cesspools before they started building sewage pipes.
Now get the fuck lost in your sulkhole for another few years, 
then come back like maybe nobody remembers you're not on your own power worth the cost of a decent burial. 
Who knows, maybe that time the world will be more amenable to shitfaces ? "You never know", right ?

Well, I don't take orders from the capricious Caesar anymore, and don't have a sulkhole - I have a lulzhole, and let me tell you TMSR provides plenty of fodder for that lately. So let's have some more fun with this. Botty has an experimental search function, so I dumped "Mircea Popescu" + all the words related to shit into the hopper. The first result? Why it's a reddit post, where it appears a year earlier some of the other TMSR cult members tried to spread the gospel, with the same predictable results I got from my "reddit experiment".

This gem gave me the idea for the title of this post:

oh nu, mircea popescu sau cum sa asterni o diaree de 500 de cuvinte si sa nu zici nimic.

It gets lulzier:

No. Some of us did, around the late 2000's, but he ended with the nickname the irrelevant worm.

One can tell so many lies that something is rotten in ... Denmark.

He thought that having a blog to swing his dick around would make him someone. 
That didn't work because he had a shitty view of life, people and everything. 
Then he moved to harassing other fellow romanian bloggers, 
random, then bribing to say nice things about them or some shit. 
He would blatantly lie, make up shit about people or places that his been to or things he might have done, 
then harass people or bloggers who would call him as a liar and a poser.

Ouch!

Pasting the text from the above comment and running `wc -w comment.txt` on it revealed a word count of 113, so it could have been worse - the recent drama with poor asciilifeform produced a word diarrhea with a count numbering in the thousands which can be found in a search of the logs.

That's all for now folks, please excuse me, I have a lulzhole to go get lost in.

Tags: News, TMSR, Lulz

Essential kit items: Building SBCL on Gentoo with musl

November 08, 2019 — shinohai

Steel Bank Common Lisp is another must-have tool in my kit, since I use it to run my hybrid irc/Telegram bot and many other daily use items. In my previous post I documented how I managed to get gcc-4.9.4 massaged into shape, so this post will serve as a reference on how to do the same for SBCL so in the future I don't have to spend the day researching fixes and locating obscure patchsets.

When building many things using musl, one will often run into "undefined reference to `memcpy@GLIBC_*'" type errors, since glibc uses versioned symbols and musl does not. SBCL is no different, but fortunately a little digging turned up a working patchset on the SBCL mailing list which works beautifully, so I didn't have to spend the better part of a day cobbling one together as I did for gcc. I have preserved a copy of the patchset here and will definitely do my best to maintain these into the future should any major changes occur.

Much like Ada, SBCL requires itself or another ANSI common lisp to build. I decided to use CLISP (version 2.49.92) to perform this task, as it can be quickly built from sources using gcc only (and I didn't want to use a pre-built sbcl binary of unknown provenance). After getting clisp in place, building SBCL is mostly painless using the following steps:

I downloaded the 1.5.7 sources from my site and verified the checksums:

curl -O http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/dev-lisp/sbcl/1.5.7/sbcl-1.5.7-source.tar.bz2
curl -O http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/dev-lisp/sbcl/1.5.7/Manifest.sha512

Unpack the sources and enter the directory:

tar xjf sbcl-1.5.7-source.tar.bz2 && cd sbcl-1.5.7

Get the musl patchset and apply them:

wget -q -r -nd -N --no-parent -R "index.html*" http://btc.info.gf/devel/gentoo/distfiles/dev-lisp/sbcl/patches/
for i in *.patch; do patch -p1 < $i; done

Build using CLISP and install:

./make.sh "clisp" --fancy
./install.sh

The above recipe has so far worked quite nicely, having been tested by running the above mentioned irc bot and a few other essential lisp programs. I will update this post if/when any bugs are found or if any changes are made.

Tags: News, Linux, Lisp

Building gcc 4.9.4 with musl on Gentoo

November 05, 2019 — shinohai

Lately I have been experimenting a lot more with musl as a replacement for the continually shitty glibc. While musl was a standard part of cuntoo, it appears that particular project is mostly abandoned by it's author and I want to be more responsible for my own toolkit anyway. So starting with the most recent vanilla musl gentoo stage3, I decided getting my preferred compiler working would be first order of business. I tried the portage route with a simple `emerge -av =sys-devel/gcc-4.9.4-r1` which sang along happily for a while until hitting "configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs." and a few other errors.

After spending some time researching the errors and trying various fixes, I managed to produce a patch that will allow me to manually perform the ebuild steps and get a working gcc for musl. I used the following steps:

Download the sources:

ebuild /var/db/repos/gentoo/sys-devel/gcc/gcc-4.9.4-r1.ebuild fetch

Configure:

ebuild /var/db/repos/gentoo/sys-devel/gcc/gcc-4.9.4-r1.ebuild configure

Go to the source work directory (located at /var/tmp/portage/sys-devel/gcc-4.9.4-r1/work/gcc-4.9.4) and download this patch (sig) and verify, then patch:

patch -p1 < gcc-4.9.4-musl.patch

After patching, complete the manual ebuild steps:

ebuild /var/db/repos/gentoo/sys-devel/gcc/gcc-4.9.4-r1.ebuild compile

ebuild /var/db/repos/gentoo/sys-devel/gcc/gcc-4.9.4-r1.ebuild install

ebuild /var/db/repos/gentoo/sys-devel/gcc/gcc-4.9.4-r1.ebuild merge

Enjoy your shiny new compiler.

(chroot) shinohai ~ # gcc-config -l
 [1] x86_64-gentoo-linux-musl-4.9.4 *
 [2] x86_64-gentoo-linux-musl-8.3.0

Next order of business will be trying a fellow named ave1's Ada build for musl and making a POST1 on the results, in addition to publishing the steps I used to get SBCL working in this environment as well.

Read more...

Rome continues to burn as S.NSA liquidation announced

November 04, 2019 — shinohai

Mircea Popescu continues the war against his own allies, this time announcing the liquidation of MPEX stalwart S.NSA. The linked article contains many lulzworthy gems, my favorite being:

As a factual matter, for the interval quoted, which is to say the past six years, Stanislav Datskovskiy has produced exactly nothing.

One can easily verify that this is nonsense, thanks to asciilifeform we have the only known fully auditable TRNG in existence, FUCKGOATS, an excellent Arithmetic library, FFA (which hopefully will replace OpenSSL in therealbitcoin at some juncture.) and too many other treasures to list in this post. You don't have to take my word for it however, simply visit loper-os.org and read the cornucopia of goodies within - It's quite easy to spend an entire afternoon reading one post after the next.

I for one am happy asciilifeform has finally uncoupled himself from the capricious Caesar and look forward to see what other indestructible tanks roll out of the loper workshop in the future. As part of my own personal renaissance, I hope I can put some of these excellent tools to use should The Bitcoin Foundation survive this brouhaha.1

More will be published on the continuing saga of TMSR as events unfold. Stay tuned folks!

Read more...

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections 5

October 19, 2019 — shinohai

From around teh interwebz:

A LBGTBBQ rights cucks the clucks and sends Chick-fil-A packing in Reading, England. Their crimes include not selling chicken on Sunday and a notable absence of filthy faggot fry-cooks in their kitchens. (archived)

Pizarro ISP continues to wrap up operations, after a sparrow fart and a match brought operations to a screeching halt earlier this month. Management responded to the incident by simply null routing Pizarro ipspace and showing affected users pretty charts, hoping no one would notice their incompetence under fire. Electronic keys were revoked in a desperate move to keep the gringo monies in their cache, but apparently it's ok to sue now, this one time. A smattering of mp-turdpress tmsr blogs have resumed operations, though Eulora homepage minigame.biz was still down at the time of writing, leaving fans of auctionbot spam in #eulora irc to find a new log source.

A backdoored version of the Tor browser was used to steal Bitcoin from darknet market users.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, TMSR, Lulz

Persistent Packeting Problems Plague Pizarro

October 06, 2019 — shinohai

An apparent DDoS attack on Pizarro ISP has left the TMSR without a portion of it's infrastructure. Affected services include Qntra, nosuchlabs, Eulora, and several blogs and logbots. The solution will likely be an amalgamation of more pythonshit and berating Republican vassals, so that services aren't brought down by a bash script while learning the finer points of systems administration ever again.

Tags: News, Insecurity, Lulz, TMSR

Yet another Zcash bug

October 01, 2019 — shinohai

Zcash is urging it's userbase to immediately upgrade their wallets and node software to apply an "important security fix". A bulletin issued by the developers released no details, but stated:

"Version 2.0.7-3 of Zcashd includes an important security fix in response to an issue that was reported to us on Friday September 13th 2019 by Florian Tramèr, Dan Boneh, and Kenneth G. Paterson. Users should upgrade their nodes to this version immediately and discontinue use of older versions. Please note that the issue does not put funds at risk of theft or counterfeiting. More details of the issue will be released in coordination with the reporters of the issue at a future date."

This latest undisclosed issue is the second reported flaw in Zcash this year alone, the first being a bug that was found that allowed one to print unlimited monies which the developers kept secret for 8 months.

UPDATE: The bug was disclosed by KMD developer Duke Leto, who stated:

“A bug has existed for all shielded addresses since the inception of Zcash and Zcash Protocol. It is present in all Zcash source code forks. It is possible to find the IP address of full nodes who own a shielded address (zaddr). That is, Alice giving Bob a zaddr to be paid, could actually allow Bob to discover Alice’s IP address. This is drastically against the design of Zcash Protocol.”

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Insecurity, Lulz

soopy452000, an indictment

August 14, 2019 — shinohai

Sometime around the exit of Bryce Weiner, the Unobtanium project acquired a new "developer" who goes by the moniker of soopy452000. Let's examine a few alarm bells on why you shouldn't let this guy anywhere near you coin, or anything to do with mission-critical code for that matter, and put this conversation to bed.

Love 'em and leave 'em. Señor soopy has a reputation of inserting himself into cryptocoin communities, making questionable code changes, and absconding with funds. Good 'ol Bitcointalk registers a complaint from a user who testifies he sold 3 billion Beecoin for LTC, left the community hanging, and moved on to Navcoin. (archived)

anotherlateminer: "Read 2 pages from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=601247.msg8923728#msg8923728 BEEs have been sold in order to be used for development and there are still no signs of any development. LTC are just gone."

Telegram chats have provided a few gems as well:

A kind stranger comes to the main channel to warn what UNO might be getting into. (archived)

It didn't take long for teh lulz to manifest:

Readers of this blog already know about the war on cryptography from various "nation-states", and why you should be very careful of what tools you use when working with these items. Soopy exhibits very amateur behavior when dealing with such, from generating keys using keybase.io1 (archived), to posting unusable signed walls of text to Telegram chats that can't be verified.

Yes, this has predictable results, and clowns in this camp will likely come up with the same tired excuses to explain it. (archived)

Socialisms, like zooko.usg "dev subsidies" have no place in cryptocurrency. But that doesn't stop picadors trained in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka from trying to print unlimited money, and hoping no one notices, as was the case with 42coin:

"What is remarkable in the history of 42, is that until the spring of 2014 the coin supply was really capped at 42, but on March 17, 2014, the GitHub user sherlockcoin (aka soopy452000) made it unlimited. He was working under KGW implementation and no one noticed this "small change"." (archived)

So there you have it folks, and the above-stated reasons are just a few examples of why I won't be trusting any code pushed by this moron to the "official" Github2, and neither should you. But, Caveat Emptor, do your own research, and decide for yourself.

Read more...

btcbase logs fail again

August 02, 2019 — shinohai

The btcbase irc log for the tmsr in #trilema has apparently left the building once more, leaving the crumbling republic with no real-time documentation of it's proceedings. Caesar Augustus hinges hopes on forum member lobbes finishing a logbot, hopefully one that doesn't put the `$` symbol in front of words every third line like it's author. Until then, it appear the channel will enter radio silence.

UPDATE: A Trilema post was made on subject, with the following at the tail of the logs:

    Aug 02 08:28:52 * feedbot has quit (Write error: Connection reset by peer)
    Aug 02 08:34:50 * mircea_popescu removes channel operator status from deedbot
    Aug 02 08:34:54 * mircea_popescu removes voice from whaack
    Aug 02 08:34:58 * mircea_popescu removes voice from trinque
    Aug 02 08:35:01 * mircea_popescu removes voice from spyked
    Aug 02 08:35:08 * mircea_popescu removes channel operator status from scriba
    Aug 02 08:35:13 * mircea_popescu removes voice from scriba
    Aug 02 08:35:17 * mircea_popescu removes voice from phf
    Aug 02 08:35:20 * mircea_popescu removes voice from mod6
    Aug 02 08:35:23 * mircea_popescu removes voice from Mocky
    Aug 02 08:35:26 * mircea_popescu removes voice from lobbes
    Aug 02 08:35:30 * mircea_popescu removes voice from jurov
    Aug 02 08:35:33 * mircea_popescu removes voice from dorion
    Aug 02 08:35:37 * mircea_popescu removes voice from diana_coman
    Aug 02 08:35:41 * mircea_popescu removes voice from danielpbarron
    Aug 02 08:35:44 * mircea_popescu removes voice from bvt
    Aug 02 08:35:48 * mircea_popescu removes voice from BingoBoingo
    Aug 02 08:35:51 * mircea_popescu removes voice from billymg
    Aug 02 08:35:55 * mircea_popescu removes voice from ave1
    Aug 02 08:35:59 * mircea_popescu removes voice from auctionbot
    Aug 02 08:36:03 * mircea_popescu removes voice from asciilifeform
    Aug 02 08:36:09 * mircea_popescu removes voice from mircea_popescu
    Aug 02 08:36:14 * mircea_popescu removes channel operator status from mircea_popescu

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

Bitcoin SV scheduled fork will increase block size to 2GB

July 23, 2019 — shinohai
Faketoshi's shitcoin "Bitcoin SV" is planning an update, called "Quasar" on July 24, and will increase maximum block size to 2GB. The upgrade will likely allow more weather app data to be stored in their "blockchain". The forecast calls for a 100% chance of lies and scams.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Canonical Shithub repositories hacked

July 06, 2019 — shinohai

Canonical Ltd (Ubuntu) source code repositories on Shithub were reportedly compromised this morning, complete with buttery screenshots. (archived)

No official word from Shithub or Canonical was available at the time of posting.

Tags: News, Insecurity, Lulz

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections 4

July 06, 2019 — shinohai

The lulz in this story begin in a thread for the XJO cryptocuurency on bitcointalk. This guy suggests you can "run an entire 'DNM' on the XJO blockchain" and links to a javascript page (archived) that will happily eat your private keyz and encrypt and decrypt thingz for you!

Why this is incredibly stupid:

  1. iGolder.com should be all you need to know, but you can also google search it if you wish.
  2. No mention is made of airgap setups, and the joulecoin.info site is connected to the internet when performing crypto functions.
  3. No mention made of layering (see above), and why you should be using 4096-bit or higher rsa keys for any comms, period.
  4. Cost of 51% attacks and other lulz would be near nothing for interested 3-letter agencies.
  5. Point #1 is honestly enough to end this discussion.

"But it's so luser friendly, everyone can do it!"

There is no scenario that exists, or shall ever exist, where "paste your key here" ever becomes proper handling of cryptographic keys, and certainly not in situations that require proper OPSEC and associated sanitation procedures. This is seriously the most retarded post I've read all year, and tardstalk produces some very brain-damaged threads.

TL;DR OP is an utter moron and you should seek advice elsewhere if you use crypto in any high-risk situations.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Insecurity, Lulz

SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

June 29, 2019 — shinohai

via Shithub.

"At present I (speaking only for myself) do not believe the global keyserver network is salvageable. High-risk users should stop using the keyserver network immediately."

etc.

Update: Bonus lulz from phuctor.

Tags: News, Insecurity, Lulz

Facebook announces Libra

June 18, 2019 — shinohai

Mark Zuckerberg finally finds some webshits capable of badge-engineering a "cryptocurrency" to life, and calls it Libra

In ancient Rome, the Libra was equivalent to roughly 12 ounces. An inquiry to facebook offices as to whether Libra would be backed by 12 Oz of Mark Zuckerberg's shit spray-painted gold with a certificate of authenticity went unanswered.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Webshit

Hoaxtoshi rekt by VERified address signature

May 17, 2019 — shinohai

Roger Ver gives us our morning dose of lulz with this reply over the wire to hoaxtoshi's claims:

gentoo ~/devel/bitcoin/bin/ # ./bitcoin-cli verifymessage \
16cou7Ht6WjTzuFyDBnht9hmvXytg6XdVT \
G39S6i4XsfQnixN5ePMjVPboWvGXdnW8xFFAXiwEriZFCclflbD7umP58u3Sl+dvvXC5BxBrRNkTMNf92O1UIXw= \
"Address 16cou7Ht6WjTzuFyDBnht9hmvXytg6XdVT does not belong to Satoshi or to Craig Wright. Craig is a liar and a fraud."

true

Hoaxtoshi and Calvin Ayre will likely publish a Coingeek article disputing the claims. Popcorn is on sale in the lobby all this weekend and next week.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Binance Chief suggests bitcoin block reorg to undo hack

May 15, 2019 — shinohai

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao actually suggested mimicking mEthereum and performing a block reorg to enable his exchange to recover from a 7`000 BTC SFYL earlier this month. Mr. Zhao apparently forgot that Bitcoin is immutable and many came out to mock his McAfee-level stupid suggestions. Blockstream CEO Adam Back was quoted as saying:

"You just have to accept that Bitcoin is final because a whole bunch of factors which we can get into, but it’s basically, you know, all of the infrastructure is set up to automatically just continue consuming and finalizing transactions. And there’s a lot of inertia and equipment that’s just running away, mining transactions, so it’s very hard. The software is not designed to undo things. The infrastructure isn’t designed to undo it. And there’s all kinds of side-effects if you did. And the side-effects are both technical and economic. "In game theory, if you can undo something, the attacker can do other things. And people who disagree with the reorg can do other things. People are very incentivized to see it not happen because they’ve seen other coins have this happen and suffer a great loss of credibility as a result. And there are also geopolitical issues that, you know, you would establish a precedent that would erode one of the major benefits of Bitcoin, being censorship-resistance, which ties back to this kind of finality of the network."

#btcinfo extends condolences to Binance and Mr. Zhao, and are so very sorry for your loss.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Webshit

Cryptopia exchange makes exit scam official

May 15, 2019 — shinohai

New Zealand based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia is closing up shop and beginning "liquidation proceedings" a.k.a. SFYL. Trading is suspended (again!) and the website contains only a press release this morning, which reads:

15/05/2019 David Ruscoe and Russell Moore from Grant Thornton New Zealand were yesterday appointed liquidators of Cryptopia Despite the efforts of management to reduce cost and return the business to profitability, it was decided the appointment of liquidators was, in the best interests of customers, staff and other stakeholders. The liquidators are focused on securing the assets for the benefit of all stakeholders. While this process and investigations take place, trading on the exchange is suspended. "Given the complexities involved we expect the investigation to take months rather than weeks." The liquidators are also working with independent experts and the relevant authorities with regards to the company’s obligations. Grant Thornton will be contacting all customers and suppliers about its appointment in the next few days. Further enquiries, please email liquidation@cryptopia.co.nz

The final tally of the SFYL from this long-running shitcoin trade hub will be reported in a later post.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Webshit

mEthereum mods resign reddit posts

May 14, 2019 — shinohai

A bunch of eth-huffing redditards decide to ragequit. The sound of table flipping makes it to coindesk.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Docker gentoo env recipe

May 10, 2019 — shinohai

This page is just a note on reliable ways to get a working gentoo environment using Dockerfiles. Useful mainly for making decent working shell that you don't care about for testing things. :)

The recipe can also easily be modified to use own stage3 and not be reliant on dockerhub, though abuse of the autobuild scripts sometimes spawns a shellbot over irc.

docker pull btcinfo/stage3-gentoo-amd64 docker run -it btcinfo/stage3-gentoo-amd64

This gives you a root shell

37b0f185b13d ~ #

Populate the portage tree with the latest official portage snapshot, or use your own archived snapshot.

cd usr/ wget -c http://distfiles.gentoo.org/snapshots/portage-latest.tar.xz tar xvf portage-latest.tar.xz

You can now emerge the packages you need and build from sources. Do what thou will.

Tags: News, UNIX

Official Alpine Linux Docker image found to allow NULL password for root users

May 08, 2019 — shinohai

Docker woes continue as security researchers discover that all "Official images" of Alpine linux (since v3.3) allow NULL passwords for the root user. This event, along with Docker Hub being hacked serve as a wonderful reminder of only running code from trusted sources and personal libraries.

Tags: News, Insecurity, Lulz, UNIX

Amazon opens shitcoin service to public

May 01, 2019 — shinohai

Need your own shitcoin? AWS now has you covered with the announcement that they will open their "Managed-blockchain-as-a-service" for public consumption.

Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS General Manager and former Microsoft Tech Support worker Rahul Pathak had this to say:

“Customers want to use blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum1 to create blockchain networks so they can conduct business quickly, with an immutable record of transactions, but without the need for a centralized authority.2"

Support for Hyperledger is available now, with flaming-tire-in-a-shitpit Ethereum to be launched in coming months, allowing AWS customers to choose the shitcoin service they want to facilitate flushing their money down the toilet.

Read more...

TMSR logs domain btcbase down for 3 days and counting

May 01, 2019 — shinohai

Oh the mighty Republic. You know, that place far superior to yours truly1 and everyone else, that will conquer the US gubmint and similar entities? No?

Unlike Jesus Christ, who was alleged to have risen from the grave after 3 days, btcbase.org/log/ has been down for 72 hours as of the time of this post. No worries, really, as this site shows last working i.p. address of the domain as 104.131.72.249 which can handily be added to your `/etc/hosts` file for normal operation. Future references to btcbase logs in this blog will simply be archived to avoid the issue.

The outage is just yet in another of the performance anomalies predicted back in January. Expect TMSR to back-burner a few of the current bikesheds being worked on to bikeshed dns for a while in coming weeks.

Read more...

Principality of Sealand offers safe haven to seastead couple.

April 29, 2019 — shinohai

The Principality of Sealand has extended an offer of safe haven to Chad Elwartowski & Nadia Supranee Thepdet, who are accused of violating Thai sovereignty and face either life imprisonment or death if captured. The pair set up a small structure 14 nautical miles off Thailand's coast, and billed the floating home the "world's first seastead" in a facebook post dated April 13th. The couple fled prior to a Royal Thai Navy task force raid, and are believed to be in hiding on the mainland now according to police.

Sealand said further in their statement:

Such a draconian reaction from a national government serves as a stark reminder:why it is important to challenge the status quo. We hope for a swift & peaceful resolution to the situation, & are ready to help in whatever way possible.

Updates to this post will be made if and when they become available

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Sealand

Microsoft "discovers" remote device management backdoor in Huawei laptops

April 24, 2019 — shinohai

The backdoors discovered in the device drivers were in no way a part of a Chinese government plot to spy on Westerners, and Huawei say it will take "legal action" for "misleading reports" in the media. (archived)

Tags: News, Lulz, Webshit

Building Unobtanium on Docker

April 17, 2019 — shinohai

This docker recipe has so far proved a stable way to get repeatable results when building Unobtanium binaries for 64-bit Linux and Windows. I am mainly making this post to reference the steps I took, as the method is applicable to most coins.

Download my unobtanium-devenv and untar it.

curl http://btc.info.gf/library/bitcoin/alts/uno/unobtanium-devenv.tar.gz | tar zxvf -

Enter devenv and build the docker image

cd unobtanium-devenv/

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f unobtanium/docker-compose.windows.yml build

Go have a coffee and smoke while the container builds.

When that build finishes, start the container.

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f unobtanium/docker-compose.windows.yml up -d

Find your container id and connect (as root)

docker container ls --all

docker exec -u root -t -i <container-id> /bin/bash

From the docker shell, go clone my Unobtanium repo.

git clone https://github.com/Shinoa-Fores/Unobtanium.git && cd Unobtanium/depends/

Let's do a Windows build, just for fun.

make HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32

The process of compiling the dependncies takes about 2 hours. I usually also invoke `import colombian websluts` at this point. When I return to the terminal we are ready to build the UNO qt and cli .exe's

cd ..

./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix="$PWD/depends/x86_64-w64-mingw32/"

make

Kill another hour drinking coffee, smoking, and looking at cats on internet.

mkdir -p bin

cp src/*.exe bin/

cp src/qt/unobtanium-qt.exe bin/

Enjoy your shiny new Windows wallet. Repeat the depends step and rebuild to produce binary for any arch you have a config for.

The x86_64 Linux version lets you do nice things, like run custom .qss so I darkened the wallet. I will post this config to the blog shortly.

Have fun, and feel free to complain about this build method on irc or telegram.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, UNIX

Happy Trannyversary

April 13, 2019 — shinohai

Let's take a moment to celebrate that time a transsexual camho from Telegram visited #trilema irc, posted their "tits" for 2 bitcents, and got their picture published on trilema.com and no one batted an eye. Because animals are animals, whether superficially human or not, right?

Eyes were already burned from the other cattle and swine being processed that week anyway.

Happy Trannyversary all, and may this year bring abundant lulz to all.

Tags: News, Lulz

Mark Karpeles handed suspended sentence in Mt. Gox trial

March 15, 2019 — shinohai

A Japanese court found former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles guilty of tampering with financial records, but elected to suspend his 2.5 year sentence and allowing him to avoid squealing like a pig in prison.

Bloomberg reported that Karpeles viewed his treatment by Japanese authorities as unfair, instead of thanking them for helping him shed some much needed weight:

Karpeles has said he was interrogated for months without a lawyer and bullied into signing a confession, a "nightmare" process during which he lost 77 pounds over 11 months.

The government of the U.S. still blames Russian national and former btc-e exchange operator Alexander Vinnik for laundering the stolen funds from Mt. Gox and is attempting to extradite him to America to face charges. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

BlockCypher reveals mETHereum hard fork lulz

March 13, 2019 — shinohai

tl;dr: BlockCypher decides to continue to offer support for Ethereum despite services being non-operational for almost a month following the recent "upgrades" to the network.

After examining every which way we could think of to add the Trie state to our Ethereum state, we asked Vitalik for assistance. His first comment to us was "oh you’re one of the few running one of those big, scary nodes." We asked him if he knew of anyone else running a "big, scary node" to see if we could possibly sync with them. He knew of no one, not even the Ethereum Foundation keeps a full archival copy of the Ethereum chain.(Emphasis added) We were back to square 1: starting the Full sync again, this time including the Trie state.

This led to stunning results:

"Lesson Learned #3: In the event of a chain re-organization, we may be the only ones to know the entire history of Ethereum transactions."

This seems to mark a developing trend of aversions to a "foundation" model though running big, scary nodes will always remain the only method to ensure a complete and accurate history of the blockchain.

You can read the entire shitty medium post discussing these lulz here if you're so inclined.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Webshit

Weechat logs to html

March 06, 2019 — shinohai

weechat-log-to-html is a Haskell script that converts weechat logs to no-nonsense html. This addition to the /library/ is part of this years goal to excise as much pythonshit as possible from everything I use on a regular basis. Individuals that have Bitlbee hooked up to their weechat will be pleased to know that this script also beautifully parses things such as telegram or discord logs, for which no suitable logger (at least not one written in the aforementioned pythonshit or nodejs) can be found.

To use:

Compile the script using `ghc` - I used version 8.0.2 with good results. Then simply run something like the following:

./weechat-log-to-html < (weechatlog) > output.html

Example output:

Once verified that it works for you, you can simply add the script to a cronjob to monitor the irc channels and other chats you wish to log.

Tags: News, IRC, UNIX

Thailand SEC bans Bcash, other altcoins

March 03, 2019 — shinohai

Thailand's equivalent of the SEC announced it would be prohibiting the exchange of BCH (Btrash) and a handful of other cryptocurrencies in order to "protect its citizens" from fraud. The r/btc lemming force is expected to coordinate hundreds of posts later in the week denouncing all things Thai, which likely will stay confined to the reddit corral now that twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he would not add Btrash as on option on Square payments or twitter. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

Coinomi wallet sends user passwords in plaintext over Google API

February 28, 2019 — shinohai

Today's Lulz come courtesy of "Bitcoin Wallet" Coinomi, which handily sent user passwords over Google spell check in plain text using their Webshit framework. btcinfo sends condolonces to affected "users" and is very SFYL. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz, Webshit

Fiat users can now get pegged with JPM Coin

February 14, 2019 — shinohai

US Based JP Morgan Bank launches its own USD pegged "cryptocurrency" to the public. SFYL induced peggings expected to be reported in future posts. (archived)

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

BSV found to host CP

February 06, 2019 — shinohai

Fork of a fork of BTC BitcoinSV's recent increase in the OP_RETURN data size has led to unknown individuals using it to store child pornography images on the BSV chain. The images were placed into tx's using Ryan X. Charles "Money Button" service, which makes it easy to embed data into transactions. Unlike the links to CP discovered in the actual Bitcoin blockchain, the "Bigger Blocks" allow for full images to be stored immutably on their blokechain and will likely be heralded as BSV and nChain's "Killer App". (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

NEM cryptocurrency foundation "nearly broke"

January 31, 2019 — shinohai

Cryptocurrency NEM (XEM) announced it is "nearly broke" after blowing through 80 Million NEM tokens (valued at ~$4 Million USD at time of writing) in just a little over a year, which was used to advertise vaporware. Layoffs and restructuring are in the works in an attempt to save the organization, according to newly elected foundation president Alex Tinsman, and the group is begging the community for double the amount of tokens (160 XEM, ~7 Million USD) to avoid imminent doom. Ms. Tinsman promised that none of the funds would be used for marketing, though she believes scummy affiliate marketing tactics can help monetize the foundation and avoid future bailout requests. The foundation currently consists of around 200 members who pay an annual $50 fee and must dox themselves in order to vote. (archived)

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

CoinBr announces suspension of online services

January 30, 2019 — shinohai

The operator of the MPEx brokerage service CoinBr, jurov, announced in a blog post this morning that the service would be shuttering its online operations for the foreseeable future. Lack of interest and 0 usage in the past year were cited as reasons for the change, unsurprising considering the general poor performance of TMSR enterprises during that time period. Captain obvious makes an appearance later in the #trilema logs declaring that hand-cranked processes are superior to automated ones, also unsurprising when proffered services aren't being used.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

McAfee flees U.S. after tax fraud allegations

January 24, 2019 — shinohai

John McAfee announced earlier this week that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is allegedly charging him with felony tax evasion for 8 years non-payment of taxes, and that he will be "running his Presidential campaign from exile on a vessel dubbed "The Freedom Boat".

The first transgendered US President?

McAfee assured his followers on twitter that he would be releasing videos every day as long as the exile lasts, which leads the author to the conclusion that ample supplies of tinned penis, Xanax, and electronic equipment were provisioned in the freedom boat's hold before casting off. (archived)

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Insecurity, Lulz

TRB Keccak regrind - test results and notes

January 20, 2019 — shinohai

I had originally intended this to be a better version of the build instructions I mirrored from the foundation website, but decided to wait for the regrind before making a post, since the foundation planned on updating everything anyway. A few days later mod6 published a blog post detailing the steps he took to update the trb vtree from SHA512 to Keccak vpatches, so that is what will be covered in this post. What I did was, I went through all the similar steps just as in mod6's post, and I created my own keccak trb vtree, just as mod6 did. I then was able to confirm that my keccak trb vtree and his keccak trb tree are a mechanical match. I also did a diff of my keccak trb vtree against the original SHA512 vpatches, and we can see that only difference is the removal of the UTF8 character from genesis.vpatch.

You will need all of the dependencies listed on the bitcoin foundation website in the "how-to" section. A modified version of mod6's `v.pl` (that produces Keccak hashes) and a few other tools are also needed: these can be obtained from diana_coman's website. I no longer use nor support any other flavor of Linux besides Gentoo for any projects discussed on this site , so users of other distros will be required to do their own research to make all this work. I am using a Cuntoo chroot here, and for the sake of thoroughness, here is a list of the exact versions of the dependencies I used:

* sys-devel/bc 1.06.95-r2 * sys-devel/gcc 4.9.4 * app-crypt/gnupg 1.4.10 * net-misc/wget 1.19.5 * net-misc/curl 7.61.1 * dev-lang/perl 5.24.3-r1 * sys-devel/patch 2.7.6-r2 * net-misc/rsync 3.1.3 * sys-apps/coreutils 8.29-r1 * app-arch/unzip 6.0_p21-r2 * app-arch/bzip2 1.0.6-r10 * app-arch/cpio 2.12-r1

A working Ada setup is required to build vk.pl and the tools from diana-coman's starter pack. mod6 also wrote a handy and very detailed guide to doing this here. Since I am using a clean chroot to perform all these steps, I needed to install a new copy of Adacore, so I proceeded to grab a copy of the gnat-gpl-2016-x86_64 version from the AdaCore website here, though for some reason the page 404'd at the time I was doing these tests. Fortunately diana_coman also has this preserved on her website here for those that might need it in the future.

Once that was installed, I checked to ensure it was, in fact, the proper version:

Perfect! Building the starter pack is very painless and took less than a minute for me.

Now I moved on to the actual regrind by setting up the suggested sandbox and moving down the list of steps in mod6's blog post. This also went quite painlessly, my only snafu being I forgot to add back a hyphen "-" for the utf-8 char removed from line 118 of util.h, which caused a byte mismatch later in the process. Once that was done, I had no other problems with the process and was ready to test using mod6's experimental patchset and seals which he handily provides here, along with the signature for same. This part requires one follow the `OFFLINE` build steps from the foundation website, so it will be necessary to download the dependencies from deedbot if you don't have a copy stored somewhere already. I put all the links inside a bash script, intentionally leaving off the -sSL flags so I could observe their download progress.

cd deps/ cat >eu.sh<<EOF curl http://deedbot.org/deed-430460-2.txt > rotor.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-430460-1.txt > rotor-db-configure-fix.patch.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-422651-1.txt > boost_1_52_0.tar.bz2.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-422651-2.txt > buildroot-2015.05.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-422651-3.txt > db-4.8.30.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-422651-4.txt > openssl-1.0.1g.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-1.txt > binutils-2.24.tar.bz2.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-2.txt > busybox-1.23.2.tar.bz2.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-3.txt > expat-2.1.0.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-4.txt > fakeroot_1.18.4.orig.tar.bz2.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-5.txt > gcc-4.9.2.tar.bz2.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-6.txt > gdb-7.8.2.tar.xz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-7.txt > gmp-6.0.0a.tar.xz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-8.txt > linux-3.18.14.tar.xz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-9.txt > m4-1.4.17.tar.xz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-10.txt> mpc-1.0.3.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-11.txt> mpfr-3.1.2.tar.xz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-12.txt> musl-1.1.8.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-13.txt> ncurses-5.9.tar.gz.asc curl http://deedbot.org/deed-427443-14.txt> pkgconf-0.8.9.tar.bz2.asc EOF chmod +x deps.sh ./deps.sh

After enjoying un cafecito, the dependencies were finished downloading, so I deleted the script and changed back to the bitcoin directory. A simple `make` completes the process. I encountered no hiccups, and roughly a half hour or so later had a nice shiny bitcoind produced using vk.pl and the keccak patchset only.

In the interests of science, and to ensure repeatable results I went a step further and redid all the regrind steps in a fresh sandbox, and signed a copy of all the patches with my gpg key. Before performing a press I put mod6's copy of the patches in a directory `a` and mine in a directory `b` and ran `diff -uNr a b` against them to ensure they matched, which they did. This build also went fine with no errors, and output a 4.7M to bin/. Now let's test it:

Success! Node is happily pulling blocks.

In conclusion, this work represents an outstanding effort on the part of mod6 to ensure trb remains unmolested in the future. I have uploaded my copies of the resulting patches and the corresponding seals here for those that wish to compare them with their own during testing.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, UNIX

mETH upgrade delayed due to vulnerability.

January 15, 2019 — shinohai
Ethereum, the gift that keeps on giving, has been forced to delay the long awaited "Constantinople" upgrade after researchers with ChainSecurity discovered a loophole that would pretty much recreate the DAO attack of 2016 all over again. This latest fail is the second time the upgrade has been delayed due to mETH devs having no idea what they are doing. (archived)

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, SFYL

mETH Classic 51% front for exchange theft

January 11, 2019 — shinohai

The 51% on the ETC network reported earlier this week appears to have been orchestrated by enterprising individuals who managed to rewrite tx history and make off with $220K USD worth of ETC from shitcoin exchange Gate.io. (archived)

The exchange reported that the SFYL occured between 0:40 Jan.7, 2019 and Jan 4:20 Jan.7, 2019 UTC and lasted a mere 4 hours.

"All the transactions were confirmed normally on the ETC blockchain and became invalid after the blockchain rollback."

US based exchange Conbase also reported a "$1 Million USD loss" of ETC using the same methods during the attack window. Gate.io announced it would be absorbing the cost of the SFYL for it's customers.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, SFYL, Lulz

Building the Eulora client with Gentoo

January 11, 2019 — shinohai

Having gotten trinque's excellent Cuntoo bootstrap working on a few different machines, I decided I'd try building a Eulora client with it. This post is to document the steps I followed to get to a working state, as the instructions on the minigame website are outdated and contain dead links.

In this guide, I am using gcc 4.9.4 - I'm pretty sure this is a hard requirement. Crystalspace for whatever reason requires you have the nvidia-cg-toolkit installed even if you use an ATI card, so go ahead and get that via portage:

emerge -av nvidia-cg-toolkit

I have a ~/devel directory already from building trb, so I'll start there and make a eulora directory beside it:

mkdir -p eulora/ && cd $_

Grab cal3d, crystalspace, and the Eulora client files from the minigame site:

wget http://minigame.biz/eulora/source/cal3d.tar.gz
wget http://minigame.biz/eulora/source/cs_July24.tar.gz
curl http://minigame.biz/eulora/source/eulora-v0.1.2b.tar.gz > eulora-v0.1.2b.tar.gz

Untar that shit.

tar -zxvf cal3d.tar.gz
tar -zxvf cs_July24.tar.gz
tar -zxvf eulora-v0.1.2b.tar.gz

Navigate to cal3d/ and run the following commands to build:

autoreconf --install --force
./configure --prefix=$HOME/devel/eulora/cal3d
make
make install

Tell other programs where to find the cal3d things we just built:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/devel/eulora/cal3d/src/cal3d/.libs/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Go back to ~/devel/eulora/ and enter the cs-forupload folder:

cd ../cs-forupload/

To build crystalspace I had to adjust the configure step to avoid anything bullet related, or the jam build step will barf. Use the following commands:

./configure \
--without-java \
--without-perl \
--without-python \
--without-3ds \
--without-bullet \
--with-cal3d=/$HOME/devel/eulora/cal3d

jam -aq libs plugins cs-config walktest

Export the crystalspace environment variable:

export CRYSTAL=$HOME/devel/eulora/cs-forupload

Finally, go back to ~/devel/eulora/ and enter the EuloraV0.1.2 folder ...

cd ../EuloraV0.1.2/

...and build the client:

./autogen.sh
./configure \
--with-cal3d=$HOME/devel/eulora/cal3d \
--with-cs-prefix=$CRYSTAL \
--without-mysqlclient \
--without-sqlite3 \
--without-pq \
--without-hunspell

jam -aq client

Eulora servers got a new home in 2018, so we must edit the server ip in data/servers.xml:

sed -i 's/50.115.127.84/161.0.121.201/' data/servers.xml

Now, to avoid having to manually enter the environment variables each time we want to play, we will create a shell script containing those and make it executable:

cat >eu.sh<<EOF
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/devel/eulora/cal3d/src/cal3d/ \
.libs:$HOME/devel/eulora/cs-forupload/:"$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export CRYSTAL=$HOME/devel/eulora/cs-forupload
./euclient
EOF

chmod + eu.sh

./eu.sh

It was night in Eulora when I finished, so I only took a single screenshot of client startup. More to come as I test further.

May your journey be prosperous ....

Tags: News, Games, UNIX

ShapeShaft: One third of shitcoin exchange workforce slashed

January 09, 2019 — shinohai
Shitcoin exchange shapeshift.io announced that it is "laying off" 37 people, or around a third of its workforce. CEO Erik Voorhees wrote in a medium post that there were multiple factors included in this decision, though he may use some terms unfamiliar to readers. We will attempt to translate a few below.

According to Voorhees:

ShapeShift diversified its product line too early and in too many verticals, resulting in financial, legal, and time costs.

Translation: "We added support for just about every shitcoin imaginable and are surprised at the result."

We had customer issues. Business was declining from both aggregate market recession and increased competition. Our imposition of KYC?d accounts, themselves the result of trying to be cautious in a challenging regulatory environment, caused many of our most valuable API partners to leave us for competitors who have not perceived regulatory risks in the same way. We expected it, but still, it stung both financially and psychologically.

Translation: "We decided to capitulate to fiat demands and are surprised at the result."

2018 marked a rough year. While this new one starts upon some painful reorganization, we?re encouraged and hopeful for 2019.

Translation: "We lost so much money in 2018 we had to fire people but are still hopeful that *someone* out there that will continue to buy our shitcoin bags in 2019."

...and so on.

Headlines such as these have been trending lately, likely Festivus miracles that began with similar announcements by Coinbase, Steemit, Bitmain, and others. Other manifestations of miracles were reported by Qntra this month, where it was noted that mETH addicts were experiencing a chain reorganization with predictable results.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

ETC reports possible attack

January 07, 2019 — shinohai

A carbon copy of mETHereum undergoes a suspected 51% attack after several deep block reorgs. Naturally nothing of value was lost or ever at stake.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, SFYL

Ledger adds bluetooth SFYL device to stable.

January 07, 2019 — shinohai

Deciding that not enough cracks are visible in their wallet design, Ledger announced a new device called "LedgerX" that eminently hackable bluetooth support, which will handily announce your candidacy for SFYL to anyone within 10-20 meters. The company already entered the New Year as a loss leader after the wallet.fail team reviewed the device and determining it to be covered in webshit.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Webshit

A Decade of Bitcoin

January 03, 2019 — shinohai

On this date ten years ago the Bitcoin genesis block was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite repeated attempts to sabotage the project from within and without, the network continues to grow and blocks steadily mined.

Here's to ten more years of sovereignty ..... cheers!

Tags: News, Bitcoin

Bitmain terminates 50% of remaining workforce.

December 25, 2018 — shinohai

Rumors swirling on "executive social media" site LinkedIn hint that mining conglomerate Bitmain is slashing the size of it's workforce by 50%, most of the affected employees being part of a BTrash wallet development team calling itself "Copernicus". The company famously concentrated a large amount of resources towards supporting Roger Ver and mining the Bcash fork of Bitcoin, and are now experiencing the SFYL that naturally occurs when people chase scamcoins. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Handheld game roms

December 25, 2018 — shinohai

While searching for the Basic games collection the other day, I stumbled upon a forgotten archive containing roms for a bunch of old handheld electronic games from the 70's and 80's. If you had any of the games on the list below, your childhood was likely pretty awesum. I have used MESS to run these, but feel free to try on other platforms (as I did not include any MESS-specific xml files with this archive).

List of games contained in archive:

ROM NAME:         GAME:
---------------------------------------------------------------
advision          "Adventure Vision"
alnattck          "Alien Attack"
alnchase          "Alien Chase"
amaztron          "Amaze-A-Tron"
astro             "Astro"
astrocmd          "Astro Command"
bambball          "Dribble Away Basketball"
bankshot          "Bank Shot - Electronic Pool"
bcclimbr          "Crazy Climber (Bandai)"
bdoramon          "Dokodemo Dorayaki Doraemon"
bfriskyt          "Frisky Tom (Bandai)"
bmboxing          "Knock-Em Out Boxing"
bmsafari          "Safari (Bambino)"
bmsoccer          "Kick The Goal Soccer"
cdkong            "Donkey Kong (Coleco)"
cgalaxn           "Galaxian (Coleco)"
cmspacmn          "Ms. Pac-Man (Coleco)"
comp4             "Comp IV"
cpacman           "Pac-Man (Coleco, Rev. 29)"
cpacmanr1         "Pac-Man (Coleco, Rev. 28)"
ebball            "Electronic Baseball (Entex)"
ebball2           "Electronic Baseball 2 (Entex)"
ebball3           "Electronic Baseball 3 (Entex)"
edracula          "Dracula (Epoch)"
efball            "Electronic Football (Epoch)"
egalaxn2          "Galaxian 2 (Entex)"
einvader          "Space Invader (Entex, TMS1100)"
epacman2          "Pac Man 2 (Entex)"
galaxy2           "Galaxy II"
gckong            "Crazy Kong (Gakken)"
gdigdug           "Dig Dug (Gakken)"
ghalien           "Heiankyo Alien (Gakken)"
gjackpot          "Jackpot: Gin Rummy & Black Jack"
gpoker            "Poker (Gakken, 1979 version)"
h2hbaseb          "Head to Head Baseball"
h2hfootb          "Head to Head Football"
invspace          "Invader From Space"
kingman           "Kingman"
machiman          "Machine Man"
maniac            "Maniac"
mathmagi          "Mathemagician"
merlin            "Merlin - The Electronic Wizard"
microvsn          "MicroVision"
mmerlin           "Master Merlin"
msthawk           "Star Hawk (Mattel)"
mvbfree           "Mini-Vid Break Free"
mwcbaseb          "World Championship Baseball"
packmon           "Packri Monster"
pbqbert           "Q*Bert (Parker Brothers)"
raisedvl          "Raise The Devil"
simon             "Simon (Rev. A)"
splasfgt          "Space Laser Fight"
splitsec          "Split Second"
ssfball           "Superstar Football"
ssimon            "Super Simon"
starwbc           "Star Wars - Electronic Battle Command"
starwbcp          "Star Wars - Electronic Battle Command (prototype)"
tandy12           "Tandy-12: Computerized Arcade"
tc4               "Total Control 4"
tcaveman          "Caveman (Tomy)"
tccombat          "Cosmic Combat"
tmpacman          "Pac Man (Tomy)"
tmscramb          "Scramble (Tomy)"
tmtennis          "Tennis (Tomy)"
tmtron            "Tron (Tomy)"
ufombs            "UFO Master-Blaster Station"
vinvader          "Invaders (VTech)"
wildfire          "Wildfire (prototype)"
zackman           "Zackman"

The archive can be downloaded from the \warez\ section of the library here.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Tags: News, Games, UNIX

Festivus 2018

December 23, 2018 — shinohai

I would like to take this opportunity to wish all readers a happy Festivus and many returns. As we stand around our very high strength-to-weight ratio Festivus poles and air grievances today, here's hoping that all will find the holiday refreshing and cathartic.

And with that, it's time for the holiday dinner and the feats of strength. Seeing as how my challengers are quite lovely this year, I imagine the festivities could last 2-3 more days.

Peace!

Tags: News

Alabama police department blames Satan for recent spike in homicides

December 21, 2018 — shinohai

No, they really did. (archived)

The Facebook message is quoted in full below:

THIS PAST SUNDAY, A YOUNG MAN WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN KINSTON. MONDAY NIGHT, A MOTHER WAS SHOT AND KILLED IN NORTHERN COVINGTON COUNTY. THERE HAVE BEEN FIVE MURDERS IN COVINGTON COUNTY IN 2018. THESE MURDERS HAVE BEEN DONE BY OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. THIS IS HAPPENING BECAUSE WE HAVE TURNED AWAY FROM GOD AND EMBRACED SATAN. WE MAY HAVE NOT MEANT TO DO SO BUT, WE HAVE. IT IS TIME TO ASK FOR GOD?S HELP TO STOP THIS. IT IS TIME TO BE PARENTS AND RAISE OUR CHILDREN, NOT HAVE THEM RAISE US. IT IS TIME TO FULLY SUPPORT LAW ENFORCEMENT AND STAND BY THE OFFICERS AND DEPUTIES THAT ARE FAR TOO OFTEN HAVING TO WALK INTO THESE DANGEROUS SITUATIONS AND CLEAN UP THE MESS. FRIENDS, IT IS TIME TO STAND UP AND BE RESPONSIBLE, GROWN UP LEADERS IN OUR COMMUNITY. BOTTOM LINE, THERE ARE SHEEP; THERE ARE WOLVES AND THERE ARE SHEEP DOGS. WHICH GROUP DO YOU BELONG TO ?

The National Freedom From Religion Foundation says the department is "wrongly promoting religion with the social media message" seeing as it is illegal for a government entity to endorse or criticize religious belief.

Tags: News, Lulz, Murica, Webshit

dpb removed from republican rss roll

December 21, 2018 — shinohai

THE CONTESTANTS

The learned Trishop, danielpbarron

VS.

mircea_popescu

ROUND RESULTS:

The theological lulz continue over in trilema, with MP asking for danielpbarron's blog to be stricken from the rolls in the #trilema and #eulora channels on freenode irc - leaving the logs free for more srsbzns like bot spam.

In order to help you quickly find the droning you should be looking for, btcinfo provides these handy NPC's. Just click on the image and it returns log searches relevant to the title.

Do *you* have a suggestion for a NPC that should be added here? Send a GPG signed message to btcinfo()atsdf.org and we will make every effort to include it on these very pages. Non-encrypted or non-signed content is simply ignored.

At the time of publication this morning, danielpbarron had not responded to the event on the pages of his blog.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

Vitalik completes meme circle

December 20, 2018 — shinohai

Buterin finally gives away some $300K USD worth of ETH as he exits school to focus on breathing new life into the mETH industry. Diploma mill University of Basel recently awarded Butern an honorary doctorate, presumably for his work in quantum computing schemes and building a product that consistently loses user funds.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Pennsylvania Porch Pirate Pilfers Poop.

December 16, 2018 — shinohai

A thief swipes a box from a man's porch that contained used cat litter instead of Amazon treasures she had expected. (archived)

Tags: News, RSS, Webshit

Sending out remote pings to telegram

December 16, 2018 — shinohai

good morning :)

Tags: News, RSS, Telegram

BCash continues descent into obscurity.

December 14, 2018 — shinohai

Bitcoin Cash (a.k.a BCash, Btrash) saw prices fall to a record low of $82 USD across exchanges today, representing a 98% decline from the all time high. BCash has suffered rekt syndrome since "Hoaxtoshi" Craig Wright decided to split to his own chain, known as "Bitcoin SV", a few short weeks ago. Price for this fork of the fork of Bitcoin still sits below BCH, at $74.50. coin.dance reports just slightly over 1,000 Bitcoin ABC nodes in operation at the time of this article.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Decade sentence recommended for former MtGOX CEO

December 12, 2018 — shinohai

Prosecutors in Tokyo's District Court recommended a 10-year prison sentence for former MtGOX CEO Mark Karpeles in their closing arguments today, asserting that he "betrayed his clients and used a huge amount of their money" and constructed a flimsy excuse to cover it all up. MtGOX was formerly the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, but went bankrupt in 2014 after around $423 million USD worth of Bitcoin and fiat went missing. Karpeles claimed "LOL, we wuz haxed" and that the money discrepancies were personal loans, though prosecutors allege no documentation exists to support his version of events. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Scams

E Mare Libertas

December 07, 2018 — shinohai

December 7, 2017: Sealand entered the Bitcoin age by accepting it's first transaction on https://www.sealandgov.org/shop/ -847267494

December 7, 2018: Sealand welcomes twins to the household.

E Mare Libertas

OMS

Tags: News, Micronations

Cyprian cryptocurrency charges collapse in court

December 06, 2018 — shinohai

Alexander Vinnik, operator of defunct (though recently operating as wex.nz) cryptocurrency exchange btc-e had all charges against him dropped in a Cyprian court. The plaintiffs withdrew all charges of "fraud, money-laundering, and other grave crimes" according to a statement by Mr. Vinnik's attorney. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

bcinfobot

December 06, 2018 — shinohai

bcinfobot is a common lisp bot that bridges irc and telegram, and performs a variety of mostly useless crypto stats. It currently resides in the #btcinfo channels on freenode irc and telegram.

IRC command prefix is `$` - You must have a registered gpg key to use this bot.

This post will be updated as soon as comprehensive list of all commands can be added. Discussion is currently more vibrant on telegram, and discord support has been requested.

Tags: News, Info, UNIX

US Marine aircraft lost in midair collision.

December 06, 2018 — shinohai

The U.S. Department of the Navy continues in it's mission to destroy all of it's equipment itself before the enemy can do so in combat. A Marine f-18 Hornet and a KC-130 tanker during a training refuel near Japan.. No word was available on the condition of the pilots at the time of this article (archived)

Tags: News, Lulz

Zcash on Coinbase, a twitter comedy in two acts ...

December 05, 2018 — shinohai

Zany Zooko gets his turd listed on Conbase. Within hours, ZEC is dumped. Lulz were had.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Scams, Lulz

Anti-Trump messages blamed on twitter hackers

December 05, 2018 — shinohai

Rudy Giuliani's cybersecurity team fails at the internet. twitter is blamed.

Tags: News, Insecurity, Lulz

How to eat shit and die, a manual.

December 05, 2018 — shinohai

Serial scammer "Bitcoin Tre" announced on twitter that he would consume his canine companion's shit if the USD price of Bitcoin isn't $10 by January 1rst of 2020. Trevon James is well known for peddling Bitconnect jenkem for r/edditards to huff, and was named in a class action lawsuit by Bitconnect losers in September of this year. Mr. James is the second individual this year that has proffered to eat unusual items, with John McAfee taking the lead by offering to eat his own dick on live national television.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Chinese Ethereum vulnerable to ancient bug

December 04, 2018 — shinohai

The NEO platform (Chinese Ethereum) was discovered to be vulnerable to the same default settings bug that caused mETH tards to have funds liberated from their nodes back in June. Chinese tech company Tencent first reported the bug, and encouraged all users to update their nodes as soon as possible, instead of correctly advising users to simply abandon the platform, and anything else remotely resembling Ethereum. Coinmarket cap lists an imaginary valuation of $532 million USD for this corn riddled steamy pile of Asian shit.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Insecurity

Cuntoo, a Linux that sucks less

December 02, 2018 — shinohai

This weekend I had a bit of extra time on my hands, so I decided to dust off an old AMD E-300 APU laptop I had sitting about and try building trinque's Cuntoo on it. The entire operation was pretty straightforward, and the bootstrapping script makes all this a painless operation as far as Gentoo goes.

First step is to download the bootstrap in a tar archive and the corresponding signature from here: http://trinque.org/2018/11/27/cuntoo-bootstrapper/ . It appears the site is hosted on pizarro now, and downloading the archive took a little over 2 hours. Since I am quite aware that Pizarro resources can be overwhelmed with a single box making requests, I just left this to download overnight and checked on it in the morning. trinque has his head screwed on pretty straight, so the archive and sig were waiting in my Downloads folder after morning coffee.

After examining the bootstrap script, I put a copy of my amd64 configuration file into the config/ folder, since I don't have an apu2 board. One then needs to locate the block device they will be installing to, in my case `lsblk` revealed this to be located at /dev/sdc, so I ran: `./bootstrap.sh -k config/config.amd64 -d /dev/sdc` .... and the magic began! The author recommended enjoying tea whilst the bootstrap process completed. The entire process took roughly six hours to complete, which will give one time to enjoy their favourite beverage and a fuck or two. When I came back to my desk I was greeted with the message "Create a user account, which shall be granted sudo access." After that, the script will ask you to paste a ssh public key in, to allow password free logins upon reboot. Painless, I say!

Those steps being complete, I got one final message: "You should now have a fully bootable Cuntoo system on "/dev/sdc". Enjoy!" The moment of truth. I then restarted the machine which booted very quickly into a new, no-nonsense Gentoo Linux environment.

Since the first run was successful, I decided to see how this recipe would work if I stuffed it onto a spare 32G flash drive I had lying about. This also worked fine, and now I have a portable version I can access via chroot on my workstation, since I have a less austere Gentoo recipe I use for day-to-day things.

I now intend to try running the ebuilds I have made for the projects I use most against this, and will report my findings here. Happy compiling!

Tags: News, UNIX, Software

btcinfo - Webstats for November 2018

December 02, 2018 — shinohai

I am pleased to see that btcinfo has consistently stayed in the top 10 sites hosted on sdf.org all this year. Thank you, dear readers!

date         hits  bytes-xfer        b/hit   secs    s/hit      kbps
--------------------------------------------------------------------
01-Nov-18:    373    80185457    214974.42    458     1.23    170.97
02-Nov-18:    426   101094978    237312.15    585     1.37    168.76
03-Nov-18:    428   138225674    322957.18    561     1.31    240.62
04-Nov-18:    534    30290732     56724.22    529     0.99     55.92
05-Nov-18:   1062   649974493    612028.71   1513     1.42    419.52
06-Nov-18:    373    39771020    106624.72    806     2.16     48.19
07-Nov-18:    541    36004514     66551.78    459     0.85     76.60
08-Nov-18:    431    35870574     83226.39    374     0.87     93.66
09-Nov-18:    411    31338076     76248.36    355     0.86     86.21
10-Nov-18:    419    29556055     70539.51    347     0.83     83.18
11-Nov-18:    511    34180448     66889.33    341     0.67     97.89
12-Nov-18:    410    23532919     57397.36    320     0.78     71.82
13-Nov-18:    716    24015957     33541.84    353     0.49     66.44
14-Nov-18:    403    14800671     36726.23    359     0.89     40.26
15-Nov-18:    415    35937435     86596.23    263     0.63    133.44
16-Nov-18:    438    10725841     24488.22    408     0.93     25.67
17-Nov-18:    534    16255161     30440.38    199     0.37     79.77
18-Nov-18:    439    60452598    137705.23    545     1.24    108.32
19-Nov-18:    412    13514797     32802.91    104     0.25    126.90
20-Nov-18:    389    22665338     58265.65    183     0.47    120.95
21-Nov-18:   3337    13029740      3904.63    319     0.10     39.89
22-Nov-18:    407     9506617     23357.78    101     0.25     91.92
23-Nov-18:    364    21900787     60167.00     80     0.22    267.34
24-Nov-18:    363    57093130    157281.35    555     1.53    100.46
25-Nov-18:    448    89163898    199026.56    421     0.94    206.83
26-Nov-18:  12188   122419547     10044.27    528     0.04    226.42
27-Nov-18:    577   156847677    271833.06    682     1.18    224.59
28-Nov-18:    568   168297324    296298.11    590     1.04    278.56
29-Nov-18:   1943   182766475     94064.06    772     0.40    231.20
30-Nov-18:   1098   179193175    163199.61   1024     0.93    170.89

Webstats for all sites hosted on sdf are hosted here. You can view the same official stats for this site here.

Tags: News, Stats

Filipinos to be paid in trash to collect trash

November 29, 2018 — shinohai

Residents of Manila may soon be "compensated" with mETH tokens in exchange for spending a few hours cleaning up trash on beaches in the capital city. ConsenSys, billed as the largest development firm on the flaming-tire-in-a-shitpit that is Ethereum, hopes to kickstart their Bounties Network dApp by appealing to uneducated 3rd-world users who might be tricked into believing that the tokens they receive have any value. Participants in this scheme with any intelligence at all will hopefully immediately swap any ETH received for actual Bitcoin on their preferred cryptocurrency exchange. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Malicious GasToken Minting in mETHereum disclosed

November 21, 2018 — shinohai

Quoted from the public disclosure by Level K:

This is a public disclosure of a newly discovered vulnerability. Some affected parties have already been notified in a private disclosure that was sent out on November 13th. When ETH is sent to an address, that address is able to perform arbitrary computations paid for by the originator of the transaction. This is a known vector for griefing. However, in some cases, at-risk systems such as exchanges did not put proper protections in place. GasToken, which takes advantage of the refund mechanism on storage in Ethereum, allows users to store gas when the gas price is low and receive a gas refund when the gas price is high. By minting large amounts of GasToken when receiving ETH, the griefing vector mentioned above can now be a profitable attack. Because it was unknown which exchanges did and did not have the protections in place, the private disclosure was made to as many exchanges as possible, many of which were not at risk. To our knowledge, all affected exchanges that received the disclosure have patched the vulnerability. For more information the full disclosure can be found here.

As has been documented on this blog, and formerly on Qntra (Now pretty much the BingoBoingo blog), Ethereum is a flaming tire in a shitpit that should not be used for any purpose.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Insecurity, Lulz

Twitter account of target.com hacked to promote giveaway scam.

November 13, 2018 — shinohai

Unknown individuals gained access to the official Target twitter account earlier today and attempted to promote a 5000 BTC giveaway scam. The tweet posted by the hacker(s), now deleted, asked users to send small amounts of Bitcoin to an address in order to participate in a chance to win the Bitcoin prize, which is worth around $30 Million USD at the time of writing. The incident is another example of the poor security used by the twitter platform and its unwillingness to stop the proliferation of scams that usually target "verified" accounts.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Scams, Webshit

United States v. 7.26611032 Bitcoin

November 05, 2018 — shinohai

The U.S. Marshals service is auctioning 660 BTC today that it stole from various entrepreneurs under the guise of the "Civil Asset Foreiture Program". One must deposit 220k filthy fiat dollars minimum in order to participate in said auction, which opened at 8 AM EDT today.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

Buffer overflow bug discovered in segshit address scheme.

October 31, 2018 — shinohai

A buffer overflow vulnerability has been discovered by satoshi labs in the bech32 address scheme, used by Segshit and introduced into Bitcoin by "Core" developer Pieter Wuille. Satoshi labs assures users of their already pwnd Trezor devices that the risk is minimal and can only result in denial of service attacks, but released a firmware update immediately after the bug was confirmed. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Insecurity, Lulz

Vitalik gushes over scam success

October 05, 2018 — shinohai

mETHereum founder Vitalik Butterin admitted in a recent tweet that he is "really proud" that his 70% premine scamcoin has been so much more successful than his quantum computer scam.


Vitalik was quoted as saying during the initial offering that "We accept only bitcoin with no refunds for our premined ETH" a.k.a. "Fuck you, got mine".

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Japanese exchange hack results in $37 Million SFYL

September 20, 2018 — shinohai

Japanese shitcoin exchange Zaif announces they were hacked to twitter this morning, SFYL from actual bitcoin is reported to be upwards of $37 Million USD. Other worthless shit tokens such as Btrash (BCH) were taken, though no one knows precisely why.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, SFYL, Lulz

She was only 17

September 20, 2018 — shinohai

An international manhunt has begun for 3-D printed weapon producer Cody Wilson for sexual assault on an underage girl. Mr. Wilson is believed to be somewhere in Taiwan, singing this:

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz, SFYL

Mixxchain privacy falls flat

September 14, 2018 — shinohai

Mixxchain, where "Privacy Meets Scalability" has announced that as soon as they return from their roadshow and come up with some new buzzwords to inject into their website, will be taking applications for node operators on their vapourware network.

What are these innovative privacy features? Why KYC checks of course!

The founder of this flaming-tire-in-a-shitpit is David Chaum, whom the "team" section of the Mixxchain website claims is "widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash".

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Scams

Hoaxtoshi announces upcoming release of his one true final vision

August 19, 2018 — shinohai

Craig "Hoaxtoshi" Wright announced plans to release a competing version of the BTrash implementation which he calls "Bitcoin SV" that will "provide a clear BCH implementation choice for miners who support Bitcoin’s original vision". The new version - the really, real version of Bitcoin this time - will have support for 128MB blocks, despite the fact that the most blocks are less than 100KB, or 0.00333333333% of the current 32MB limit. The announcement comes in the midst of a time of increasing tensions between Hoaxtoshi and the "Bitcoin ABC" (BTrash) developers, who want to add new OP codes that Wright says will encourage illegal gambling and other things he can't patent or control. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Scams

Static address bug discovered in Ledger app

August 03, 2018 — shinohai

The Ledger hardware wallet team announced a serious "bug" in the Ledger Wallet Ethereum Chrome application, telling lusers to avoid using it as it generates a static address for everyone. But "Engineering is working on it" so they recommend using more Webshit, like MyEtherWallet, in the meantime while the company tries to figure out why webpages generate static addresses and bikeshed a solution.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Insecurity, Lulz, Webshit

Conbase Cucks Venezuelan Userbase.

August 03, 2018 — shinohai

Coinbase has reportedly cut off access to cryptocurrency withdrawls to citizens of Venezuela. Visitors to the site from Venezuelan IP's are reporting that the following message is being displayed in their browser:

This latest Conbase Cucking is one of a series of "LOL KYC/AML" mishaps that does not affect users of Actual Bitcoin

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Webshit

Indy developers announce mETH clients capable of sharting.

August 01, 2018 — shinohai

status.im, a "company" that makes useless application for the Ethereum database, has announced the release of Nimbus, a client they claim is capable of sharting. Clients capable of sharting have until now only produced vaporous farts, but developers hope it will offer "scaling solutions" for a network currently choked by numerous apps that offer no substantial benefit to any actual thinking human beings. Armchair "developers" are invited to participate on the company Shithub repository.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Webshit

bitcoinstats.com unpublishes chat logs for #bitcoin-otc, others.

July 30, 2018 — shinohai

bitcoinstats.com has disabled access to irc logs from its website, signaling that it intends to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which was enacted in 2016. bitcoinstats offered irc logging of the #bitcoin-dev, #bitcoin-core-dev, and #bitcoin-otc channels on the freenode network.

The GDPR website defines personal data as the following in their FAQ section:

The GDPR applies to ‘personal data’ meaning any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier. This definition provides for a wide range of personal identifiers to constitute personal data, including name, identification number, location data or online identifier, reflecting changes in technology and the way organizations collect information about people.

It is unknown at this time if freenode intends to attempt to pressure other channel owners to unpublish logs, as the GDPR website also states that the law applies "to organisations located outside of the EU if they offer goods or services to, or monitor the behaviour of, EU data subjects". A maximum fine of 20 million Euros, or zero BTC, can be levied against individuals or organizations for non-compliance.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

Bitcoin Knots restored as the default upstream ebuild

July 22, 2018 — shinohai

Bitcoin Knots is once again the default ebuild of Bitcoin for Gentoo users. In order to revert to the "Core" flavor of Bitcoin, users will need to set the USE=-knots flag going forward.

According to developer luke-jr in a recent announcement:

Bitcoin Knots provides the best end user experience out of the box (for example, only 5 GB disk space is required instead of over 100 GB). It is completely compatible with the Bitcoin network and other Bitcoin implementations, including the popular Bitcoin Core implementation.

Bitcoin knots is currently undergoing testing on the btcinfo server, and will serve as a replacement for "therealbitcoin" in irc/telegram bot functions that require bitcoind. Source code and relevant patches will be added to the /bitcoin/ section of this website in the near future.

UPDATE 7/24/2018: luke-jr informed me that the these changes have not been merged yet. I apologize for the misquote.

Reading the #trilema logs this morning, it seems this post created fair amount of confusion:

asciilifeform: in other lulz, http://btc.info.gf/blog/bitcoin-knots-restored-as-the-default-upstream-ebuild.html << shinohai endorses prb...

Please note the words undergoing testing, which should not imply any sort of endorsement or glowing review. To clarify, Knots simply offers some interesting features I want to poke with a stick more to satiate my curiosity - this segshit stuff is in wide use on alt irc platforms (Telegram, Discord, et all) and I simply want to see if any brokenness can be readily exposed. Sometimes that requires milling about in enemy territory and becoming familiar with enemy tools. Remember your Sun Tzu:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

asciilifeform is welcome to go ahead and negrate - this has nothing to do with spite, etc. as you already know all about. Ratings in a place where one's presence is not wanted mean little to me at this point. Experiments fail sometimes, but work should always continue nonetheless.

After all, I can't simply idle about on the beach every day. There's a goddamned war going on.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, UNIX

Defense Distributed wins battle against US Department of State

July 18, 2018 — shinohai

Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation were announced as legal victors in their lawsuit against the US State Department earlier this month. The plaintiffs reached a settlement with Department of Justice lawyers over the "free speech" issue, which has been winding its way through court since May 2013. Wilson says the CAD files for 3-D printed weapons parts, and the "Liberator" complete 3-D printed pistol, will be available for download from https://defcad.com/ beginning August 1. (archived)

Tags: News, Weapons

AUR latest victim of repository rape

July 10, 2018 — shinohai

More poisoned repositories are found, this time on the Arch User Repository. This, combined with the recent lulz on the gentoo shithub further confirm that only the trinque model can prevent repository rape.

Tags: News, UNIX, Webshit, Lulz

Porky's Revenge: Mayogendered money-man squeals again

July 06, 2018 — shinohai

Amazingly the heart of Mayogendered money-man Agustín Carsten has not yet failed of sheer exhaustion, and he was able to once again rant about his hatred for Bitcoin in a recent interview. It had about the same impact as it did last time he squealed, and Buterin's waterfall continues to weaken. (archived)

"Young people should use their many talents and skills for innovation, not reinventing money. It's a fallacy to think money can be created from nothing,"

Tags: News, Bitcoin

Raleigh woman reports Roblox rape

July 04, 2018 — shinohai
A woman from Raleigh, N.C said she was left "traumatised and violated" after watching as her "sweet and innocent daughter's avatar was ... violently gang-raped on a playground by two males" in the alt-minecraft game Roblox. Screenshots of the event shared on social media showed a ms-paintesque girl lying face down in a dark playground, presumably with the electronic seed of her attackers spilling out of her virtual virgin vagina. The players responsible for these lulz were "permanently banned" from the platform, which boasts 64 million monthly players. (archived)

Tags: News, Lulz, Webshit

Site updates: RSS support, new package mirrors.

July 03, 2018 — shinohai

RSS support has been fixed, is now available at http://btc.info.gf/blog/feed.rss.

The following tools and packages have been added to the /packages/ section of the library:

gpg-1.4.10

gcc-4.9.4

V99993K (mod6) I altered mine to display ascii graphs, nothing worth publishing. Update 07/05: Added the fix suggested by ave1 to turn off robots.txt in wget here

vtools (phf)

Tags: News, Uncategorized, UNIX

Zerodium offering increased rewards for UNIX 0day exploits

June 29, 2018 — shinohai

Zerodium, a company that brokers exploits to governments and "law enforcement" is now offering rewards of up to one half million USD for zero days in UNIX operating systems. The company's website states that payments can be processed in Bitcoin and other "cryptocurrencies".

ZERODIUM evaluates and verifies all submitted research within one week or less. Payments are made in one or multiple installments by wire transfer or using crypto-currencies e.g. Bitcoin.

Zerodium only accepts submissions encrypted with their GPG KEY and claims to take one's privacy "very seriously", though they require a researchers personal information that they promise not to share with anyone, ever.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Insecurity, Linux

Coordinated attack on Bcash VERified

June 26, 2018 — shinohai

Not content to sit back and make idle threats, a group of "Bitcoin developers, miners and whales" known as BitPico has begun stress testing the Bcash network. The group announced their intentions in a series of tweets which started June 22, stating they would be attempting a 51% attack that they hoped to amplify over time.

“We expect to have 5000 Bcash attack nodes in roughly 6 weeks and then we will multi-fork the chain. [Roger Ver] will now cry.”

Despite claiming to receive death threats from the Bcash redditards, the group seems committed to fighting fake Bitcoin and has the author's full support.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

2017 Ethereum ICO's offered insecurity-as-a-service

June 25, 2018 — shinohai

Security researchers with positive.com, which specializes in auditing ICO's, found an average of 5 vulnerabilities in each of 2017's offerings according to a recent report. 71% contained at least one or more security flaw, and every ICO that offered an app was vulnerable. One third of all web apps contained common weaknesses such as code injection, disclosure of sensitive webserver info, or insecure data transfer. Most of the lulz were due to the copy/paste development culture which is common these days, as well as just building infrastructure on the already laughably insecure Ethereum platform, the pretend blockchain of choice for scammers worldwide.

Tags: News, Cryptocurrency, Webshit, Lulz

Zcash developer creates novel Windows ransomware.

June 22, 2018 — shinohai

This week's angry attention whore is brought to you by Zcash, which was forced to pay off the sole developer of its Windows wallet to avoid a fork. Coin Desk reported that D. Jane Mercer threatened to release a Zcash competitor if he wasn't paid for his work. A ransom of 80 ZEC, or about $15`000 USD was raised by "the community" which should pay for Mr. Mercer's crystal meth habit for about a month. Zcash has not been immune to the plummeting prices in altcoin markets this year, dropping from $876 USD at the start of the year to less than $200 USD per coin currently.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Spain welcomes Moors.

June 17, 2018 — shinohai

Spain welcomes with open arms a boatload of Moors that had been rejected by Italy and Malta. Ferdinand and Isabella are reportedly inconsolable.

Tags: News, Europe, Africa

Blockchain Beanie baby bubble bursting

June 17, 2018 — shinohai

A report from Business Insider indicates that sales of collectible "CryptoKitties" on the mEthereum database are rapidly plummeting. The startup was given $12 Million USD from "Venture Capitalists" that apparently wanted to see just how much money idiots would flush down the toilet while under the influence of feline jenkem. One of the founders of CryptoKitties says the slowdown is caused by users making more "thoughtful transactions" due to the increasing costs of transacting on the mEthereum network, a side effect that occurs when one writes contracts with the ability to launch a Denial of Service attack on itself just for lulz.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz, Scams

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections 3

June 16, 2018 — shinohai

Vitalik Butterin whines about the NSA inventing Bitcoin again, regurgitating the same claims he made in 2011.

"Malicious miners" are rumored to have liberated 5% of the total supply of Monero.

ICON - a "smart contract" on ETH - is brought to a standstill when the following feature was discovered that allowed anyone but the developer to transfer funds out of the contract:

modifier onlyFromWallet {
    require(msg.sender != walletAddress);
    _;
}

The fatal bug will likely result in a $800 Million USD SFYL to "investors" in the ICO.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Colombia's "La Diablita" detained in Barranquilla

June 15, 2018 — shinohai

"La Diablita" ( Elizenis Munoz Navarro ) was arrested in Barranquilla, Colombia whilst dancing dat ass off in la discoteca for her birthday. The devilish Donna was under house arrest orders, having been accused of stealing a cash box with about $7000 USD worth of pesos inside that belonged to a reconocido senador of Colombia. La Diablita is notorious amongst the populace for having used sus encantos to liberate millions in pesos from men all over South America.

Only the gayest of the officers were impervious to her brujerias.

Tags: News, Uncategorized, LATAM

BitKup Bitcoin Betting Begins

June 14, 2018 — shinohai

Bitkup, a DAPP built upon the Ethereum database, has started a campaign hoping gamblers will be dumb enough to use a platform known for skewing results to handle their sports-betting needs. Emails announcing bets being taken for the 2018 World Cup, which starts today in Russia, began hitting spam boxes worldwide early this morning. Since the fall of BitBet, no suitable replacement has been found for anyone looking to wager with actualBitcoin.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Qntra editor ponders proferring pizzaro ads

June 14, 2018 — shinohai

Qntra seems poised to add pizarro ISP banners to the site, seemingly ending the tradition of an ad-free experience that has been preferred in the past.

As we're not beholden to advertisers, there is no requirement for us to push the tired narrative that other so called Bitcoin news websites publish day in, day out.

No timeline for the addition of the advertisements has yet appeared in the #trilema logs.

Tags: News, Uncategorized

Yet-Another-Exchange-Hack LTD acquires Coinrail

June 11, 2018 — shinohai

Shitcoin enthusiasts are in the doldrums this morning with the announcement of Yet-Another-Exchange-Hack LTD acquiring Coinrail. Hackers have liberated a total of 1.1 Billion dollars in imagined value from "cryptocurrency" markets in the first half of this year alone. This address is said to belong to the hacker, and contains $14 Million USD in ETH tokens as of the time of this writing. There was no word as to whether Pope Butterin would invoke his mystical database powers and magic the hack away, as he has demonstrably done before.

Prices across all markets have been on decline since the announcement that US "regulators" are investigating scam exchange stalwarts that include Conbase and Buttstamp.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Gavin Andresen VERified as true hoaxtoshi

June 08, 2018 — shinohai

Roger Ver pays some schmucks to say NSA asset Gavin Andresen is the true Satoshi on bitcoin.com. No one cares since it's been known since at least 2014 exactly what he is.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Lulz

McAfee makes personal army request

June 08, 2018 — shinohai

The John McAfee lulz just write themselves:

"Make crypto great again!"

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Lulz

Crypto Company Commander Commandeers Carrier

June 07, 2018 — shinohai

The story of the National Guard Soldier that stole an armored personnel carrier gets more interesting as it turns out he was involved in the development of "cryptocurrency" as a side hobby.

He was also involved in the development of a cryptocurrency called ZenCash, before leaving the project and claiming he had discovered a way to hack its underlying blockchain.....On June 4, 2018, ZenCash did suffer a cyberattack, but there is no evidence so far linking Yahut to that event.

Alas Lieutenant Yahut could not complete his ETH-fueled rampage, and is now in Virginia State Police custody and is charged with the felonies of eluding police and unauthorized use of a vehicle. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Crypocurrency, Lulz

Argentine Embassy takes its show on the road.

June 06, 2018 — shinohai

Does anyone remember the "Bitcoin Embassy" in Argentina from 2014? No? Well the ecosystem has now evolved, and boy is it thriving! From the country that brought us the aforementioned "embassy", I present:

A minivan tour of the rural areas of Argentina to teach "la gente" the magic of "cryptocurrencies"!

Shortbus
Shortbus.exe

The tour plans to wind from from Buenas Aires province to La Pampa, Santa Fe and Cordoba. If the bus isn't torched by the end of that tour, the group plans to take their snake oil presentation to other parts of South America.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Undetermined number of exploits found in EOS code.

June 06, 2018 — shinohai

A Dutch hacker, Guido Vranken, has found a dozen "dangerous" bugs in EOS code in only 1 week. Vranken claims to have actually "lost count" of the final tally of exploits found. Miraculously, EOS still sits in the top 5 "cryptocurrencies" list at coinmarketcap.com, though it was down -0.61.5% against actual Bitcoin. Unfortunately, the hacker chose to "responsibly disclose" these bugs to the EOS team instead of using the information to induce well-deserved SFYL on the participants of the scam. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

BestMixer hoping to best Shilbert's snitches.

June 05, 2018 — shinohai

An article on Roger Ver's fake news outlet bitcoin.com claims that services like Bestmixer will keep one safe from the prying eyes of Chainalysis. Lulz are linked in the article to an official tardstalk thread that Bestmixer uses to promote it's services. Chainalysis is part of Barry Shilbert's "Digital Currency Group" and assists law enforcement investigations of all things NotBitcoin.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Vitalk Verifies Volume Vaporware

June 03, 2018 — shinohai

mEthereum creator Vitalik Butterin was recently quoted as saying that network will eventually be able to process "potentially more than 100 million transactions per second". Butterin claims that the as yet unreleased "technologies" of sharting and plasma will allow the network to scale, despite evidence to the contrary.

VitalikButterin
I can store 1TB of sharts in my purse.

Sharting is at it's most basic a method of breaking down parts of the giant turd that is the ETH database so each node only needs to process a smaller portion of the total shit, and Plasma is basically "Lightning Network" for ETH.

Buterin further stated:

So if you get a 100x from Sharding and a 100x from Plasma, those two basically give you a 10,000x scalability gain, which basically means blockchains will be powerful enough to handle most applications most people are trying to do with them.

Such world changing applications will likely include CryptoKitties and Virtual Shrimp Mining, the two highest-volume transaction makers on the platform which recently caused the network to DDoS itself.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Women In Tech: Tracey Rosenberger

June 02, 2018 — shinohai

Are you bored this weekend? Ever wake up at 3 a.m. and think "I'm just not giving the NSA enough personal information" ? Then follow along as women-in-tech(tm) author Tracey Rosenberger shows you how to build your own Amazon Alexa using a Raspberry Pi. Installation of the software is a breeze thanks to the unsigned automated scripts that ensure every packet of your precious data will get routed to improper users just like the real thing!

For those that prefer a more portable auto surveillance device, Ms. Rosenbenger has published an article on how to make Alexa your default assistant on Android.

Tags: News, Insecurity, lulz

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections 2

June 02, 2018 — shinohai
Snippets of cryptocurrency fail from around the web:

Environ, a token that promised full compliance with KYC/AML regulations, goes up in smoke, taking $100 million imaginary USD of value with it. (archived)

Serguei Popov, a "mathmetician" that worked on the IdiOTA scam, removes all traces of IOTA from his webpage.

Because all scams are better with blockchain, "premium" accessory manufacturer Monster Cables decides fake Bitcoin will resurrect slumping sales. (archived)

Online events retailer Ticketfly's website remained nonoperational today as it has yet to pay a Bitcoin ransom to the hacker that uncovered it's security failings on Friday. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, lulz

Dead Crypto Idiot Reduces World XRP Supply

May 31, 2018 — shinohai

Former chairman of the New York Republican State finance committee Matthew Mellon died of an apparent heart attack on May 18th. An early "investor" in the Ripple scam, it is believed he had roughly 1 billion XRP, or the equivalent of zero Bitcoin, that is now lost forever. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

McAfee to print own fiat

May 29, 2018 — shinohai

John McAfee continues his tireless campaign to show the world what an absolute burnt-out cokehead he is by announcing McAfee Coin which he says will be "fiat currency backed by cryptocurrencies". He goes on to explain that his idea is the “reverse of what banks are attempting”, which is true since fiat institutions and the world at large tend not to accept Schrutebucks or any other play money someone prints out on a whim. No word was immediately available as to when the "collectible currency" would be available to the public, nor the method of distribution that would be used, but he assured his twitter followers that "You will love it". Mr. McAfee is well known in cryptoverse for his batshit insane ideas on crypto and support for scammy ICO's, so stay tuned to see if this idea actually generates lulz or forever remains vaporware.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, lulz

Blog notes #1

May 29, 2018 — shinohai

So far, I am very much enjoying this new blogging system. I found a simple bash script that will generate the necessary pages using sed and awk on shithub. After thorough dissection, it seems to suit my present needs quite nicely, and I may eventually post a copy to the /library/ after a bit more polishing. No dicking about with php or databases, and posts can be composed using vim or terminal text editor of choice. This has the added benefit of allowing one to blog from a machine without an X server as inspiration strikes. Hunchentoot allows for real-time post previews in the browser, though the script does allow for previewing posts before committing them. I have only tested the script on NetBSD and Gentoo, but see no reason why it wouldn't work on African "linux" or similar.

A few days ago in the #trilema logs, lobbes asked the following:

lobbes: !Qlater tell shinohai why no comments allowed on yer blog?

Comments are currently disabled because original script contained google, disqus, and twitter cowshit that I most definitely do not want in the final product. Since this is a personal blog, and I don't expect readership to number in the thousands, plans are to implement comments using an irc bot so one can simply `>>#(post ID)` when identified from chat. Because I have more time for libations and fucking these days, don't expect to see this feature added anytime soon.

That's all for now. When more progress is made towards the above-mentioned polishing I will fire off a new post detailing the improvements.

Tags: News, Software

China sound incident forces evacuation of US diplomat.

May 24, 2018 — shinohai

A new wave of pressure from China has come in the form of an "abnormal sound incident" that resulted in further injury to an already damaged diplomat's brain. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insists the attack has all the markings of a similar attack that reportedly occurred in Cuba.

Tags: News, lulz

Verge attacker whacks off new exploit

May 22, 2018 — shinohai

Verge (XVG) is under attack again using a modified version of the same exploit which previously perplexed the pornhub privacy payments purveyors. At current speed, the perpetrators are generating 18250XVG per minute, or about $950 USD. Price plummeted another 7%+ on the news according to Coinmarketcap. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Shinohai's Saturday Shitcoin Selections.

May 19, 2018 — shinohai

A snippet of cryptocurrency fail from around the web:

Hot on the heels of Ethereum's self DDOS, the we-are-very-smart-contract platform IOTA was reportedly brought to a halt by a single spammer. Coinmarketcap ranks IOTA at #9 on it's shitcoin index.

A Chinese blockchain tea scam results in a rougly 580 BTC SFYL.

The Satori botnet has been restarted to scan the mETH network for exposed mining rigs.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Virtual shrimp mining causes ETH to DDOS itself.

May 18, 2018 — shinohai

Transactions fees on the mETH network rose to $15 USD in the past 24 hours, this time due to the proliferation of virtual shrimp mining, which perfectly complement the cryptokitty and pepe farming that already places heavy load on the network. Redditards whine about 4chan memes ruining Ethereum, having still not come to the realization that the platform is already broken beyond repair.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency

Ayre hawks Antiguan citizenship in last ditch effort to boost Bcash scam.

May 18, 2018 — shinohai

Fake news outlet CoinGeek is reportedly now offering to sell citizenship in the beautiful 3rd-world tax haven of Antigua. Benefits are rumored to include not owning any actual bitcoin, and being forced to transact in fiatist darling Bcash1 instead. Coin Geek is owned by serial scammer and liar Calvin Ayre who is notorious for working closely with hoaxtoshi Craig Wright. Source: (archived)

Read more...

SEC announces ICO

May 17, 2018 — shinohai

The S.E.C. has announced an ICO website, howeycoins.com (archived) in an attempt to show "investors" in cryptocurrency what scams look like. The words "powered by Ethereum" were strangely absent from the report, indicating the SEC missed the opportunity to save taxpayer money on the construction of a website and redirect consumers to ethereum.org directly.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency

McAfee Goes Underground

May 15, 2018 — shinohai

John McAfee has once again stopped taking his medications and announced he was going into hiding from the S.E.C. today because they are trying to "destroy a revolution by making an example out of him". In a series of rants published to YouTube and twitter, McAfee detailed how he managed to backtrace the agents sent to kill him.

He's risking *felonies* everyone! For YOU.

No word was immediately available as to whether Mr. McAfee's ICO whitepaper business would be shutting down while this latest lulzfest plays out. (archived)

Tags: News, Bitcoin, lulz

Swedish theives purloin owls for BTC

May 14, 2018 — shinohai

Swedish criminals are resorting to new methods to fund their enterprises in the wake of the cashless movement, with some opting to purloin priceless pets instead, according to a report by TheAtlantic.com. A single great grey owl specimen can fetch upwards of 13 BTC ( $120`000 USD ) on the "Dark Web". A rise in the common phishing schemes, and cryptojacking users browsers to mine Monero was also reported.

Tags: News, Bitcoin, lulz