Kargan - Slashdot User

The New York Bill that Would Ban Anonymous Online Speech-> 0

Submitted by Kargan on Thursday May 24, @03:39PM

Kargan writes "Watching faceless online passerby troll bloggers or mock fellow scribblers can be a drag, but what if legislators’ answer to online ne’er-do-wells was to ban anonymous comments from websites entirely? That’s what the state of New York is planning to do in identical bills — S.6779 and A.8688 – proposed by the New York State Assembly that would “amend the civil rights law” in order to “[protect] a person’s right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting.”

The bill would require a web administrator to “upon request remove any comments posted on his or her web site by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate.” By “web site,” the bill means just what it seems to: Any New York-based website, including “social networks, blogs forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/05/24/the-new-york-bill-that-would-ban-anonymous-online-speech/#ixzz1vol0fxcz"
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Those 500K Bitcoins That Caused a 'Flash Crash' We-> 0

Submitted by Kargan on Thursday July 14 2011, @02:51PM

Kargan writes "It looks like the hacker who breached Mt. Gox made off with about $34,000 worth of Bitcoin and then artificially crashed the market by dropping a sell order for 500,000 BTC, according to the post-mortem about the hack published by Mt. Gox. But while the hacker did withdraw 2,000 in actual BTC, which Mt. Gox is replacing at their own expense, the enormous sell order was vapor:

We would like to note that the Bitcoins sold were not taken from other users’ accounts—they were simply numbers with no wallet backing. For a brief period, the number of Bitcoins in the Mt. Gox exchange vastly outnumbered the Bitcoins in our wallet. Normally, this should be impossible.

The sales could not have been completed because there were no actual Bitcoins to transfer. The hacker had simply assigned himself a huge number of BTC, which was enough to place orders on Mt. Gox and confuse the market."
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