Tag: frauenfelder

If you bought something on Silk Road with bitcoin, the blockchain will remember it forever and possibly reveal your identity

A common misconception is that bitcoin transactions are anonymous. The truth is, unless you are very careful about covering your tracks, your bitcoin transactions can be connected to you. And the transaction records on bitcoin’s public database (the blockchain) can never be changed or deleted, meaning they will forever be searchable by authorities or anyone else. Andy Greenberg of Wired reports that researchers were able to “connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account.” [T]he Qatari researchers first collected dozens of bitcoin addresses used for donations and dealmaking by websites protected by the anonymity software Tor, run by everyone from WikiLeaks to the now-defunct Silk Road. Then they scraped thousands of more widely visible bitcoin addresses from the public accounts of users on Twitter and the popular bitcoin forum Bitcoin Talk. By merely searching for direct links between those two sets of addresses in the blockchain, they found more than 125 transactions made to those dark web sites’ accounts — very likely with the intention of preserving the senders’ anonymity — that they could easily link to public accounts. Among those, 46 were donations to WikiLeaks. More disturbingly, 22 were payments to the Silk Road. Though they don’t reveal many personal details of those 22 individuals, the researchers say that some had publicly revealed their locations, ages, genders, email addresses, or even full names. (One user who fully identified himself was only a teenager at the time of the transactions.) And the 18 people whose Silk Road transactions were linked to Bitcoin Talk may be particularly vulnerable, since that forum has previously responded to subpoeanas demanding that it unmask a user’s registration details or private messages. “You have irrefutable evidence mapping this profile to this hidden service,” says Yazan Boshmaf, another of the study’s authors.

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If you bought something on Silk Road with bitcoin, the blockchain will remember it forever and possibly reveal your identity

40 common tourist scams to look out for

Here’s an infographic with 40 scams you should be aware of when you travel. Grifting creeps have tried pulling scams like this on me on various trips but luckily they weren’t good enough at their trade to stop me from figuring out what was happening before I lost any money. The Broken Camera Someone will ask you to take a photo of them and their group of friends. The camera won’t work, and when you go to hand it back, they will drop it can cause it to smash. The entire group will then demand money for repairs, or pickpocket you during the commotion. The Fake Takeaway Menu Scam artists will slide fake takeaway menus under your hotel door, in the hope that you order from them on an evening where you don’t feel like going out. You won’t receive any food though, just a frightening bank statement after they have used your card details to make their own copy. The Getaway Taxi Driver When you arrive at your hotel from the airport, the taxi driver will kindly take your bags out of the trunk for you. He’ll seem in a rush though, and quickly hop back into his car and drive off as soon as possible. This is because he’s actually left one of your smaller and less memorable bags in his taxi.

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40 common tourist scams to look out for

The hardest and easiest languages to learn for native English speakers

The Foreign Service Institute has ranked the difficulty of learning a language for English speakers. From Blazepress : Languages based upon Latin, such as French, Spanish and Italian are some of the easiest to pick up and are placed in ‘Category I’ languages with an estimated learning time of around 6 months. Languages such as Japanese, Korean and Arabic are placed in ‘Category V,’ and can take considerably longer and an estimated 2 years to master properly. Check out the rest on the map below.

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The hardest and easiest languages to learn for native English speakers

An anonymous person with $86 million in bitcoin is giving it to charity

The Pineapple Fund was started by some nice person whose early acquisition of bitcoins made him a multimillionaire. He’s donating $86 million to different charities, including the EFF (who gets $1 million) FAQ Who are you, and why? Sometime around the early days of bitcoin, I saw the promise of decentralized money and decided to mine/buy/trade some magical internet tokens. The expectation shattering returns of bitcoin over many years has lead to an amount far more than I can spend. What do you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly spend?Donating most of it to charity is what I’m doing. For reference, The Pineapple Fund is bigger than the entire market cap of bitcoin when I got in, and one of the richest 250 bitcoin addresses today. How many bitcoins do you have? The Pineapple Fund represents a majority of my cryptocurrency holdings. Why are you remaining anonymous? Publicity has never been the point of this fund. I’m an individual. Can I get some bitcoins? The answer is no. Pineapple Fund is charity, but not that kind of charity. Please do not apply or email. We have never funded an individual request and we never will. Why the name, Pineapple Fund? I like pineapple. The only bad thing about pineapple is you can’t eat too much 🙁

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An anonymous person with $86 million in bitcoin is giving it to charity

North Korea makes the best counterfeit $100 bills

The kindly North Korean government is doing its part to contribute to quantitative easing by printing US$100 bills that are nearly indistinguishable from the ones printed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Let’s hope this eases tensions between the two countries! From The Telegraph : “It seems that whoever printed these supernotes has the facilities and high level of technology matching that of a government”, Lee Ho-jung, a bank spokesman said. “They are made with special ink that changes colour depending on the angle, patterned paper and Intaglio printing that gives texture to the surface of a note”. Another bank source told The Hankyoreh newspaper, “To print supernote-level forgeries, you need a minting corporation-level production line in place, which costs hundreds of billions of won. “This makes if difficult for ordinary criminal organisations to produce them”. Earlier versions of supernotes have been around for at least 15 years, with US government officials estimating in 2006 that as much as $250 million worth of fake $100 bills could be in circulation worldwide. … In the past, North Korea was believed to distribute the bills overseas through criminal groups and by transporting them abroad through the diplomatic pouch to embassies from where they could be slipped into circulation.

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North Korea makes the best counterfeit $100 bills

Toys R Us is bankrupt, but top execs are cleared to receive $16 million in bonuses

A Justice department attorney representing the people owed money by Toys R Us doesn’t believe the bankrupt corporation should pay lavish bonuses to the same executives who drove the toy store chain into the ground. From Judy Robbins filing: “It defies logic and wisdom, not to mention the Bankruptcy Code, that a bankrupt company would now propose further multi-million dollar bonuses for the senior leadership of a company that began the year with employee layoffs and concludes it in the midst of the holiday season in bankruptcy. Apparently, this Christmas, Toys “R” Us intends to deliver not only ‘children their biggest smiles of the year’ but the insiders, too.” Nevertheless U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Keith Phillips approved the payouts. From CW39 : Because Toys “R” Us filed for bankruptcy in September, it must now must get court approval for many of its basic business decisions. These new bonuses will be in addition to another $8.2 million in retention bonuses paid to some of these same executives before Toys “R” Us filed for bankruptcy. They would be required to return the retention payments should they quit the company within a year of receiving them.

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Toys R Us is bankrupt, but top execs are cleared to receive $16 million in bonuses

Woman makes earring to store her two-factor authentication device

Etsy engineer Samantha Goldstein made a small wooden earring to hold her YubiKey 4 Nano , a tiny USB two-factor authentication device. From Motherboard : She laser cut wood and acrylic for the base, and then used sterling silver for the posts. The key slides into the base portion for safe keeping. Goldstein plans to put up a small batch for sale later this week on her Etsy store . “Between my work badge and my phone (and sometimes my computer) I’m lugging around a lot of accessories all the time,” Goldstein told me in a Twitter direct message. “I wanted a way to carry around a Yubikey but not burden myself with one more thing to carry in my hands.” Working late in the labs on these yubikey earrings! eeee! pic.twitter.com/fDto5kSDwZ — *:･ﾟ✧ Samantha ✧･ﾟ:* (@samantha_gold) December 5, 2017

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Woman makes earring to store her two-factor authentication device

Nanotextured glass becomes "invisible"

Materials scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a way to etch nano-sized patterns into glass so that glare is nearly eliminated. Via c&en : To reduce the annoying glare from the surfaces of cell phones and eyeglasses, manufacturers often coat them with antireflective films. Yet these coatings are limited because they reduce the reflection of light only at certain optimal wavelengths. Now, by directly changing the morphology of glass in a process called nanotexturing, researchers can fabricate glass that cuts down on reflection from light across wide swaths of visible and infrared wavelengths, making the material close to invisible. The new glass could be useful in devices such as laser systems and solar cells, in which light loss causes inefficient performance.

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Nanotextured glass becomes "invisible"

Adding a bit of asphalt speeds lithium battery charging by 20 times

A Rice University chemist found that a dding asphalt to lithium batteries allowed the battery to go “from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries.” The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that showed exceptional stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles. A high-current density of 20 milliamps per square centimeter demonstrated the material’s promise for use in rapid charge and discharge devices that require high-power density. The finding is reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano .

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Adding a bit of asphalt speeds lithium battery charging by 20 times