Why are people so bothered about truly random numbers? posted February 2014

Question on superuser.com : Why are people so bothered about truly random numbers instead of ones generated by a program?

discussion on HN

Manually making a transaction in bitcoins posted February 2014

Ken Shirriff has posted an amazing post on his blog on how he managed to manually make (meaning, he didn't use the official bitcoin application) a transaction in the bitcoin ecosystem.

I'm reading through it as I'm typing this, and it's really well explained, you get to see exactly what he does in Python and there are pictures!

you can read it here

Belgian professor in cryptography hacked posted February 2014

Jean-Jacques Quisquater, a renowned Belgian professor in cryptography got his computer hacked, seems like NSA has something to do about it.

more info

How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username posted January 2014

So this guy owned @N on twitter and got extorted his account by a phishing attack. The story is well written and you should read it here : https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd

but for a tl;dr the attacker called his paypal account to ask them for his credit card's last 4 digits. Then he called godaddy to ask them to reset the password. They only asked him for the 2 first digits and the last 4s. The attacker just had to guess the 2 first digits (and he did it on the first try, he could have kept calling and trying otherwise).

Now that he had @N's domain's name, he could now see his emails. Took over @N's facebook account and started mailing him "threats".

It's pretty crazy how easy phishing is.

VPN hacked and server used to mine bitcoins posted January 2014

That kind of stuff happens and it's always pretty hard to know it happened and how it happened.

Here's an article about a guy who doesn't seem to know much about security but does a fine job finding out what happened to him and what he can do to avoid future hacks.

http://www.corrspt.com/blog/2014/01/18/tale-vps-hacked/

Jamaican team raises $25,000 in Dogecoin posted January 2014

Dogecoin, the bitcoin parody, just saw its price reaching a new level AND is going to allow the jamaican bobsled team to go to the 2014 winter Olympics.

more info

Cameron Winklevoss AMA on Reddit posted December 2013

There's an AMA on reddit right now from one of the Winklevoss brother. If you never heard of them, they were the one who originally came up with the idea of facebook but got it stolen after trying to hire Zuckerberg to code it. They're pretty famous in the bitcoin community for having bought 11million $ of bitcoins before April's big crash. The wonderful thing is, they hold on to their bitcoin during the crash. They must be very clever people because they're now, richer than ever.

Some of the interesting stuff from that AMA :

Have he sold any bitcoin?

I have yet to sell a single bitcoin.

What's the future of bitcoins?

small bull case scenario for Bitcoin is a 400 billion USD dollar market cap, so 40,000 USD a coin, but I believe it could be much larger. When this will happen, if it happens, I don't know, but if it happens, it will probably happen much faster than anyone imagines.

How did he learn about bitcoins?

Partying on a beach in Ibiza, where else?

Other altcoins?

I have not invested in any altcoins because I don't believe that any of the "problems" or issues that they address can't be addressed by Bitcoin itself.

There is a dog coin that seems to be a big joke : www.dogecoin.org

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ThePirateBay.sx -> ThePirateBay.ac posted December 2013

The Pirate Bay, literally surfing the web with their pirate ship, changing their URL once again. more info