During an attack on the Bitcoinica exchange, hackers managed to steal 18,547 BTC – valued at approximately US$100,000. The operators have taken their site offline for the time being. Bitcoinica says that no bitcoins were stolen from users during the incident; apparently, the intruders only accessed the organisation's accounts.
Exchanges like Bitcoinica are a great resource allowing people to easily purchase BTC with normal currency, but to use the exchange as if it were a bank defeats the purpose of the decentralised structure of the Bitcoin system. You should always transfer your Bitcoins to your own personal wallet so that it is under you own control. If everybody looked after their own Bitcoins then there wouldn't be huge repositories that become attractive proposition for cyber-criminals.
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.
Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.
The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. (read more)
In Iceland, the people has made the government resign, the primary banks have been nationalized, it was decided to not pay the debt that these created with Great Britain and Holland due to their bad financial politics and a public assembly has been created to rewrite the constitution. And all of this in a peaceful way. A whole revolution against the powers that have created the current global crisis. This is why there hasn’t been any publicity during the last two years: What would happen if the rest of the EU citizens took this as an example? What would happen if the US citizens took this as an example.
The people go out in the streets and demand a referendum. In January 2010 the president denies the approval and announces a popular meeting. In March the referendum and the denial of payment is voted in by 93%. Meanwhile the government has initiated an investigation to bring to justice those responsible for the crisis, and many high level executives and bankers are arrested. The Interpol dictates an order that make all the implicated parties leave the country. In this crisis an assembly is elected to rewrite a new Constitution which can include the lessons learned from this, and which will substitute the current one (a copy of the Danish Constitution). 25 citizens are chosen, with no political affiliation, out of the 522 candidates. For candidacy all that was needed was to be an adult and have the support of 30 people. The constitutional assembly starts in February of 2011 to present the ‘carta magna’ from the recommendations given by the different assemblies happening throughout the country. It must be approved by the current Parliament and by the one constituted through the next legislative elections.
So in summary of the Icelandic revolution:
Resignation of the whole government
Nationalization of the bank.
Referendum so that the people can decide over the economic decisions.
Incarcerating the responsible parties
Rewriting of the constitution by its people
Have we been informed of this through the media?
Has any political program in radio or TV commented on this?
No!
The Icelandic people have been able to show that there is a way to beat the system and has given a democracy lesson to the world.
Looks like p2p tech is finally mature enough to handle the functionality of a large SQL-intensive app like Wikipedia.
Scalaris is fully p2p and they used the project of a Wikipedia clone as their proof of concept.
"To prove our concept, we implemented a simple Wikipedia clone on Scalaris which performs several thousand transactions per second on just a few servers."
Their aim is to use it in a world-wide cluster of servers, but it shouldn't be too much of a big step to make the server aspect available for clients to run.
In Greece a new bottom-up network of cashless exchange called the Magnesia Exchange and Solidarity Network is becoming very popular. It uses a medium of exchange called "tems" which is organised with the Dutch open-source Cyclos decentralised online banking system. Hording and debt are prevented by not allowing accounts to accumulate more than 1200 tems and not allowing people to owe more than 300. The people using it feel very empowered and optimistic about being able to trade together without relying on the financial system. (read more)
Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC, is proud to announce the release of v0.1 alpha of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux designed to fulfill a crucial role in the evolution of the Internet. That role is a rapidly deployable ad-hoc wireless mesh network which can augment or replace the current telecommunications infrastructure in the event that it is knocked offline (for example, due to a natural disaster) or rendered untrustworthy (widespread surveillance or disconnection by hostile entities). Unlike other mesh networking projects Byzantium was designed to be run on any x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface. Byzantium can be burned to a CD- or DVD-ROM (the .iso image is just over 300 megabytes in size), booted from an external hard drive, or can even be installed in parallel with an existing operating system without risk to the user's data and software. Byzantium Linux will then act as a node within the mesh and will automatically connect to other mesh nodes and act as an access point for WiFi-enabled mobile devices.
Note: Byzantium is an alpha release Don't expect Byzantium to be perfect. Some features are not ready yet, others need work. Things are going to break in weird ways and we need to know what those ways are so we can fix them. Please, for the love of LOLcats, do not deploy Byzantium in situations where lives are at stake. [more]
OpenBTS is a Unix application that uses a software radio to present a GSM air interface to standard 2G GSM handset and uses a SIP softswitch or PBX to connect calls. (You might even say that OpenBTS is a simplified form of IMS that works with 2G feature-phone handsets.) The combination of the global-standard GSM air interface with low-cost VoIP backhaul forms the basis of a new type of cellular network that can be deployed and operated at substantially lower cost than existing technologies in many applications, including rural cellular deployments and private cellular networks in remote areas.
In plain language, we are working on a new kind of cellular network that can be installed and operated at about 1/10 the cost of current technologies, but that will still be compatible with most of the handsets that are already in the market.
A controversial American anti-piracy act was recalled on Friday, which came as no small victory for hacktivists who launched history's largest attack on several websites -- including that of FBI -- in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Those opposing the controversial law have grown jubilant, with many seeing Friday's news as real victory in a sort of war for online freedom. The vote on the anti-piracy legislation, which was due on January, 24, has been postponed.
Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based international digital rights advocacy non-profit, confirmed to RT that the online protests over SOPA and PIPA were the biggest in Internet history, with over 115,000 sites somehow altering their webpages.
Lilou Mace interviews Foster Gamble from the Thrive Movement covering many important topics such as democracy, liberty, free energy and more.
Some really difficult topics are raised such as the problem of democracy violating the golden rule and whether voting is of any use in such a corrupt system.
He responds to criticisms regarding his talking about so-called conspiracies of "evil agendas" taking over by saying that although consciousness and awareness are extremely important, they must be balanced by a clear understanding of reality obtained through rigorous objective research.
