Monthly Archives: November 2013

Mining and/or Investing in Bitcoins

22 Friday Nov 2013

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Should We All Be Investing in Bitcoins?

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that is used to buy goods and services online that in some cases offers total anonymity to both buyer and seller. It is being used to buy and sell illegal drugs and lots of other illicit things anonymously online. It’s also being used to solicit the assassination of politicians. You can also use Bitcoin to buy books, music, clothing and lots of other perfectly legal stuff online as well. Very soon we may all be using Bitcoins instead of credit cards to buy things online since there are no interest charges or fees attached to the use of Bitcoins.

A couple of weeks ago you might have been forgiven for waving off Bitcoins as just another passing fad but Bitcoins suddenly gained relevance this week when the U.S Senate held hearings on Bitcoin and during those proceedings U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Senators that trading Bitcoins for goods and services is not illegal and seemed to give the new cryptocurrency a nod of approval.

Another good reason that Bitcoins are in the news a lot lately is because in January of this year one Bitcoin was valued at around 13 U.S. dollars and today they are worth 700 U.S. dollars. And just in the past week Bitcoins have tripled in value.

Back when Bitcoin was invented by the super-secret, pseudonymous Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, the virtual currency was worth mere pennies.

There can only ever be a finite number of Bitcoins – 21 million, in fact. There are not yet 21 million Bitcoins in existence because the remaining Bitcoins have
yet to be “mined’. Bitcoins are “mined” on computers by folks who are a lot more tech-savvy than me using mind-numbingly complicated algorithms that become progressively more sophisticated as more and more Bitcoins are “mined”. The more Bitcoins that are “mined”, the more difficult “mining” Bitcoins becomes. If you’re interested in “mining” your own Bitcoins, you’d better start sooner rather than later because soon you’ll need a bank of super- computers to dig up even one or two.

Even though it is possible today to use Bitcoins to buy practically anything imaginable, it remains for now far simpler to use a bank card or paypal. Most of the people who are buying Bitcoins today are probably buying them as an investment. It’s very possible that the value of Bitcoins is highly inflated and this is just a bubble about to pop. It’s also just as possible that next November a single Bitcoin could be worth over three times what it is today. And it will be if the current trend continues.

So should we be mining Bitcoins? Should we at least be hoarding a few? Something to think about.

I’m @Scoroncocolo on Twitter.

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Big Brother Is Watching

17 Sunday Nov 2013

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So is the NSA spying on you? Probably not. Is your Internet Service Provider (ISP) spying on you? Yes they are. And there’s no doubt about it. This article in PC World quotes Dan Auerbach, a Staff Technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying that if your ISP chooses to they can “see what pages you looked at on that Web site you visited, and what you wrote in that e-mail”. Even if your ISP isn’t watching your browsing activity in real-time, they are certainly logging it because by law they have to in order to comply with any court ordered subpoena that could at anytime be served on them by any Federal, State or local law enforcement agency and yes even the NSA. Not only is your ISP tracking and logging your every move on the Web and storing your email in their servers, they are also collecting all of your meta-data so they can sell it to marketeers. All ISP’s have been doing this for years.

So who besides your ISP is spying on you? Google is storing mountains of
information about everything you do online even if you’re not logged into your Google account. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Apple are spying on you and so are dozens of Internet snoops like StatCounter, Woopra and Google Analytics. And like Google, all of these companies are sharing with governments worldwide but most particularly the U.S. government. According to information released last week by Google the U.S. government made 10,918 requests for 21,683 user accounts during the first six months of 2013.

Plus there’s this. Every time you visit any website it’s like you’re sharing your identity with that website’s administers and anyone else who has access to the files on the servers on which that site is hosted.

If all that’s not enough to make you a bit paranoid, here’s something else to think about. There are literally thousands of highly skilled people employed by
hundreds of companies who are working every day to create the type of software that will bring your online identity into sharper and sharper focus. And they’re not just looking at you, they’re tracking your kids too. So, is there anything you can do about it? Yes there is. You could choose to become invisible on the Internet.

The best way, by far, to become invisible on the Internet is to start using Tor rather than IE, Safari, Firefox or Chrome to browse the Web. The Tor Web browser was born as a U.S. Navy research project in 2002. The Tor browser makes it impossible for anyone or any machine to determine your IP address as you surf the Web and therefore you are totally anonymous.

Here’s how Tor works. The Tor browser runs on a network of routing points that randomize your path through the internet, making it next to impossible to track what sites and services you use. Web sites can’t track you because they can’t see you. Even your Internet Service Provider is unable to track your movements once you’re on the Tor browser. The only thing your ISP can determine is that you are on the Internet and using software that is very likely to be the Tor browser. And as Tor says on their home page: “You are now free to browse the Internet anonymously”.

To download and start using Tor go here and read the literature and follow the instructions.

I’m @Scoroncocolo on Twitter.

 

Silk Road the Bizarre Bazaar

10 Sunday Nov 2013

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On October 2, 2013 the FBI shutdown the Website Silk Road and arrested its alleged webmaster Ross William Ulbricht charging him with murder for hire and
narcotics trafficking. Even though Ulbricht, whose sobriquet was “The Dread Pirate Roberts”, is still presumed to be incarcerated a far more secure version of his Silk Road Website went back online November 6, 2013 and is still up today. And I know it’s still up because I have it open in another window as I’m writing this.

I’m sure you know that Silk Road is an online marketplace where some people buy and sell illegal drugs. Although I suppose if you live in Colorado or Washington it would be legal to both buy and sell marijuana using Silk Road but I wouldn’t ever advise it. But window shopping is not the same as buying and there is absolutely nothing illicit or dangerous about visiting the Silk Road Website.

Another reason not to shy away from visiting Silk Road is that they sell a whole lot of other things besides illegal drugs and at some great prices too. For instance, you can buy a Burberry London Winter Down Jacket on eBay for $1,139.00. Nordstrom sells the same jacket for $1,795.00. Or you could buy one on Silk Road for a hundred and twenty-five bucks. Caveat Emptor, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a Burberry London Winter Down Jacket knock-off from a firm called FoxyGirl didn’t turn out to be almost indistinguishable from “the real thing”.

The only way you can buy anything on Silk Road is with Bitcoins. Bitcoins are easy to deal with if you use a site like CoinBase and here is a handy Bitcoin to US dollar, euro, Assie dollar, British pound and Swedish krona converter because Bitcoins fluctuate sometimes wildly in value.

But back to the bargains on Silk Road. A decent pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses are going to cost you at least a hundred and fifty bucks. But you can buy Ray-Bans on Silk Road for thirty dollars. Of course The Dread Pirate Roberts sells pirated software too. You can buy MS Office 2011 from various Microsoft licensed dealers for about a hundred dollars or you could buy a full-blown licensed copy of Office 2011 on Silk Road for 20 bucks. The Ray-Bans? I say, go for it, but don’t buy pirated software. That’s stealing even if it is stealing from the evil empire. But there are tons of legal things to buy on Silk Road making it a very worthwhile visit.

But how do you get to the Silk Road? That’s not as easy as you might think. Try Googling it. You wont find it because you can’t get there from here. The Silk Road is not on the surface Web, it’s in the Deep Web. In order to access the Deep Web where the Silk Road lies you’ll need to download and install the Tor Web browser. The Tor browser is very much like any other Web browser like Microsoft’s Windows Explorer or Google’s Chrome browser or Apple’s Safari Web browser. But Tor is an “onion” browser that routes your Internet connection through a worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than four thousand relays to conceal not only your IP address but all of your activity on the Web. When you go into incognito mode on Chrome, IE or Firefox, you are by no means immune from detection. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is still logging every site you visit and monitoring everything you upload or download. But on the Tor Browser you are 100% invisible. With all the news about the intrusiveness of the NSA lately many people are beginning to do all of their Internet browsing with the Tor browser. Tor was, after all, created by the U.S. government to keep their online communications secure. But that’s for a different post.

Downloading and installing Tor is so easy that I’m not going to insult your intelligence by walking you through it. You just download it and run it like you
would any other software. You can download Tor from https://www.torproject.org/download/download and you don’t need to pay much attention to the precautionary material on the page if don’t intend to do anything illegal or provided you don’t live in a country that has laws forbidding access to Websites you might get in trouble for trying to visit on Tor. For instance, if you live in China or Iran you might want to run Tor inside a VPN or a Virtual Private Network. For those of us in Europe and the Americas who aren’t planning on breaking any laws, running Tor alone is all we need to do.

You’ll notice that it takes 60 seconds or more for Tor to load so be patient. Once you’ve got Tor running, you’ll notice that it behaves just like any other
browser except that it is really slow. It’s slow because it is bouncing packets around the massive Tor network. Inside the Tor browser the URL for Silk Road
is http://silkroad6ownowfk.onion and once you’re connected you’ll be asked to create a user name and password. Just follow the Dread Pirate Roberts’
instructions and you’ll be good to go. So have fun exploring the Bizarre Bazaar that is the Silk Road.

Addendum to the above posted 11/12/13

Tor has very recently updated. Make sure you’re running the latest version of Tor. If you’ve recently updated Tor and are now receiving the error message: “Firefox is configured to use a proxy server that is refusing connections.” This issue is easy to resolve. The old version of Tor and the updated version should not be placed in the same directory. The simple fix is to create a new folder and drag only Tor-browser2.3.25-14en-US.exe into it and then run that file in the new folder and then the browser will behave perfectly. Of course you can and will probably want to delete all Tor related files outside this new directory.

As you know if you are a Tor user, Tor runs on the back of an old build of Firefox and Firefox by default as do all major browsers run JavaScript. If you’ve got a good firewall and Anti-virus running on Windows, Mac or Lynx JavaScript is pretty safe to leave on with Chrome, FF, and IE but for reasons unknown the official Tor blog is urgently suggesting that users disable JavaScript on Tor until further notice. So once Tor loads and before you start browsing around, click the little “S” to the right of the onion on the right-hand side of the browser bar and then click on “forbid scripts globally”.

Some sites won’t behave as you’d expect them to with Scripts not enabled but that’s a small price to pay in exchange for total anonymity.

I’m @Scoroncocolo on Twitter.

Tracking Chips Embedded in Kids?

07 Thursday Nov 2013

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I’ve been following this conversation in the Times and elsewhere about the ethical implications of surgically implanting tiny devices like rfid chips in children? That, to me, is just so unimaginably unwarranted. I can see someone wanting to embed a computer chip under the skin of a pet dog or cat… but a child? The ridiculousness of it reminds me of that beautiful old Jackson Brown song called “Crow on the Cradle” that satirizes the group-think/herd mentality when there was a time that it was assumed that all we needed to do in America to keep our children safe was to arm ourselves and as the song says: “Put a bomber above her where ever she goes” http://bit.ly/1fnkEAZ