Allegedly the “evil hacker” had stolen 2,675.73 XMR, and now allegedly someone “returned” 2,696.73. This feels suspicious, especially 0.73. Thoughts?
PS nitter.net unblocked Tor again. A Tails-friendly link just in case Tor will be re-blocked
https://nitter.oksocial.net/watchfund/status/1732391070216908886
@ShadowRebel = @SummerBreeze Could you avoid a clickbait-ish title, though? Some users do find (some of) your posts informative and good. Stay cool and don’t sensationalize it :)
See also:
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records
The French National Police is unlawfully using an Israeli facial recognition software [installed massively and secretly. The Minister ordered an investigation]
EDIT: Don’t take this too seriously; do not actually send a donation (unless you really want to, like admiring “Nice photoshopping!” “Thanks for the fun pic”). While it’s entertaining and thought-provoking, using their work this way is ethically questionable too. As @z0rg0n pointed out, one could even see this as a scam. Although it’s a fine work and freedom of expression is more important, this may more properly belong to “Memes”.
EDIT2: This post and “cool if real” by @alphonse https://monero.town/post/1122495 were created almost at the same time. That was a coincidental post conflict; @alphonse’s post was actually earlier by about 1 hour!
Is someone crowdfunding a Monero ad in India’s economic newspaper?
Interestingly, a Monero ad could be circulating in India’s traditional English newspaper: The Economic Times. The pseudonymous Stoic, author of “The Monero Standard,” shared a picture of the newspaper’s November 16th edition. In the picture, it is possible to see the paper’s opened front page with a large ad about XMR.
“Monero transactions respect your privacy. Can you say that about the INDIAN RUPEE or the U.S. DOLLAR?”
Moreover, the image also includes a QR-Code for donations in “XMR only,” which suggests its owner is expecting to crowdfund what was spent for this supposed insertion.
Their conclusion might be true in a way, but their “6-point proof” is uninformed if they’re criticizing Monero.
- “All stablecoins are not stable” ← irrelevant to xmr
- “Every non-stable coin is just a bigger fool scam, since there is no use case for crypto” ← what?!
- “Crypto destroys customer protections” ← “no middle men” is what we’re intentionally trying to achieve, at the cost of obvious risk
- “All consensus mechanisms are geared to allow the wealthy to control the crypto economy” ← That’s exactly what Monero is trying to avoid
- “Crypto gives great privacy protections to anonymous criminals and scammers and destroys privacy for anyone using the system as a honest user.” ← the first half is a valid criticism but the whole sentence doesn’t make sense
- “Crypto aims to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks” ← that’s not the main goal of xmr
Either way, Monero is not about making money, if that’s your point of view. Many of us are Monero users, not investors. Correct me if I’m wrong!
The linked article is inaccurate and misleading. Your wild guess is based on that.
Currently the best blockchain analytics publicly available about the incident is this by Moonstone, and even though it seems that the victim shared the secret key with them, nothing much is known due to the nature of the privacy coin. No way other analytics providers could tell more.
Check the original source and some of the comments there before making an irresponsible accusation like the attackers must be North Korean (or Russian, Muslim, Romany, …). A knee-jerk suggestion like that does not only promote unfair racism/stereotypes, but it helps cover up the real mastermind. Although, it’s not your fault that the article is misleading, and we can’t rule out any possibility including what you suggested. The real problem here is this confusing, poorly-written article…
Somewhat curious, though not like using xmr speculatively.
Some of the media reports are negatively confusing, like saying the Monero network is defective. Date-Time in UTC.
Edit: Moonstone Research -> 2023-11-04T00:39 was based on the server response headers (last-modified). Apparently the blog post was created about 1 hour earlier (the link was posted on Github at 2023-11-03 23:50).
I’d avoid anything related to Cake Wallet (e.g. its remote nodes), seeing that the OP sgp = SamsungGalaxyPlayer is doing this side business—chain analysis, offering suspicious activity reports for CEXes, ready to collaborate with law enforcement if paid.
In 2022, it was noticed that someone from Team Cymru, a company trading net flow data, was a board member of the Tor Project, providing bandwidth, hardware, bridges (entry points to the Tor network). There was a fix: Remove Team Cymru hard-coded bridges.
Now “Moonstone Research” is proudly saying they can trace things that other companies can’t, and they’re related to Cake Wallet directly or at least indirectly, or so it seems.
This possible suspicion aside, the analysis itself is interesting. While it might be good news if we can identify the attacker, that would be actually very bad news for Monero!
[Edit 2: Read the admin’s “reasoning” and comments here or see PS below. The clearnet site is up again. The onion versions = 100% up tme for me]
[Edit: As of writing this (2023-11-01) their clearnet server is down, while the onion version is working. Cock.li is exactly like this… Relatively rarely but randomly it’s down. Kind of irresponsible but it’s just like that. Interestingly, though, onion is up and clearnet is down. Usually opposite.]
Onion http://rurcblzhmdk22kttfkel2zduhyu3r6to7knyc7wiorzrx5gw4c3lftad.onion/
Cockbox on kycnot.me - https://kycnot.me/service/cockbox
(From their webpage)
Cock.li is your go-to solution for professional E-mail and XMPP addresses. Since 2013 cock.li has provided stable E-mail services to an ever-increasing number of users. Cock.li allows registration and usage using Tor and other privacy services (proxies, VPNs) and thanks to continued funding by its users is certain to stay free forever.
Cock.li (aka Cockmail) is a Tor-friendly, privacy-focused, soon-to-be-10-year-old free email provider (IMAP, POP, XMPP, Webmail). Although currently (since around 2021) a new registration is invite-only, the admin @vc now states on their website:
E-mail is a Human Right!
Oppressive governments are using dirty tricks to try and force e-mail providers to require phone numbers or other controlled integrations to register. We will never allow these crimes against our userbase. We will stand up for the right to register for e-mail without being surveilled, and demand this right to be recognized globally. Public registration re-opens on cock.li's 10th birthday, 20 November.
Probably people here know this service pretty well, but some important points:
Their email addresses are sometimes blacklisted when you want to use them, because in the past the service was abused by spammers. So this provider may not be suitable for normal users/normal usage. Its “technical scores” may be low too, when checked e.g. via https://internet.nl/mail/ If you think this is sketchy and its name is weird, it is. It’s not for you, so please just ignore it.
A cock.li account may be great to have if you want to sign up and use it anonymously always via onion (something you can’t do with Proton or Tutanota), perhaps with PGP. Maybe great to use on Tails OS too.
Their service was not very stable in the past. In recent years, it’s been rather stable and very fast even via onion. Pop/Imap via Tor works perfectly. Cock.li onion may load 100 times faster than that of Proton.
Custom domains are not supported! Consider Disroot or Tutanota if you need them and would like to pay with Monero.
They are one of the earliest v3 onion providers. In contrast, Proton was so slow to migrate from v2 to v3 (even after v2 got obsolete). Cock.li is also one of the oldest mail providers that started accepting BTC and XMR donations. So probably they’re extremely well-funded (you know why).
If you use Thunderbird, set up your account manually (its automatic setup probably doesn’t work right).
For more info, visit their webpage. Please DO NOT abuse this based cypherpunk service.
PS. Vincent Canfield (vc@shitposter.club) wrote on September 23, 2023:
Good morning, CISA is now calling cock.li a "Malicious E-mail Domain" and implies this is because it's not "publicly available". So, cock.li will once again open to the public on its 10th birthday, 20 November. #StopRansomware
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa23-263a
For those who don't remember, a previous CISA advisory which recommended "service providers strengthen their user validation and verification systems to prohibit misuse of their services" shortly predated cock.li going invite only.
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa21-116a
I'm sure if cock.li added phone number verification these joint statements would go away. Everyone sees what's happening, you want to force all providers to link to identities so you can surveil people. Cock.li is never adding that bullshit.
privacy is often considered a tabu when talking about money, despite being a well-accepted fundamental human right for other topics. The growing development of high-surveillance financial tools often creates controversy and conflict of interest against privacy cryptocurrencies.
[We] asked ChatGPT to pick three privacy cryptocurrencies:
The AI responded with its top 3 picks being Monero (XMR), ZCash (ZEC), and Dash (DASH).
“Renowned for its unparalleled privacy features, Monero uses ring signatures, ring confidential transactions, and stealth addresses to anonymize all transaction details. By concealing the identities of the sender and receiver, as well as the transaction amount, Monero makes financial data tracking nearly impossible, ensuring complete discretion for the users.”
— ChatGPT-4
Because my videos will be a bunch of Monero wallet tutorials.
Sorry I have to say this, but you misinformed people here, saying one shouldn’t use Feather on Tails. It’s okay, everyone makes a mistake, but you stopped engaging conversations here on Monero.town as soon as questions were asked related to your confusing statements. So I’m not sure how to feel about this, although what you’re trying to do seems generally interesting and your website can be informative if one doesn’t believe it blindly.
In fact, your website still claims “Although you’d think Feather wallet would be the slowest because of Tor, it’s actually very efficient and fast as a light wallet. Since the IP address is hidden” etc. which is kind of confusing (Feather is fast by default because syncing is not via Tor, so your IP is not hidden). You’d trivially know such basics if you were an actual wallet user, let alone someone suitable to author wallet tutorials. Perhaps you can help us with other things, not about Monero wallets. Thank you!
So you are lolcat and spamming the link to 4get.ca? If so, that makes you look a bit uncool.
Good things: unlike DDG or MetaGer, zero tracking. zero ads. Clean. Unlike SearXNG, you’re not using Github (a good move). This might become huge. The fact that it’s not perfect now, doesn’t matter.
Bad things: Obviously it’ll be hard to be better than SearXNG. A donation link is especially bad; ko-fi.com itself can be there, but… In the donation campaign, SearXNG accepted crypto, while you’re only using a Paypal-like thing. That’s not really cool.
What Happens if an Instance Disappears?
I may be wrong, but one potential problem in such a case might be that (not you'd totally lose your data but on the contrary) you won't be able to delete your posts etc. even if you want to delete them, since its copy is "mirrored" by many other instances. Not sure though.
Tor Browser is planning to remove Google from the search engine options a user can choose: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/41835
There some say brave onion + no JS is good: https://search.brave4u7jddbv7cyviptqjc7jusxh72uik7zt6adtckl5f4nwy2v72qd.onion/
Mullvad team seems to be considering 4 possible options:
PS: Not disgussing ddg / ddg onion too much, basically because ddg is the long-time default search engine of TB. Most TB users assume ddg is a decent, standard, generic option, esp. its non-JS version.