Bitcoin White Paper’s 13th Anniversary Celebrated with Decentralized Pizza (and Gilbert Gottfried)

Today the iconic Bitcoin white paper “celebrates thirteen years of financial disruption,” notes Cointelegraph, “after being first published on Oct. 31, 2008, by an anonymous person or entity named Satoshi Nakamoto.” (Here’s a 2013 story from Slashdot about version 0.3.)
Cointelegraph writes:

The white paper, titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, foresaw the need for a peer-to-peer online payment system that is self-governing, secure and limited in quantity. The Bitcoin network was launched on Jan. 3, 2009, with each Bitcoin priced at $0.0008…. Today, Bitcoin maintains a stable trading value well above $60k after experiencing a gradual appreciation of 7,749,999,900% since its launch.

Cointelegraph celebrated the anniversary by embedding a video of the original bitcoin white paper being read by comedian Gilbert Gottfried — but they weren’t the only ones. Entrepreneur/investor Anthony Pompliano celebrated with the return of what he describes as a decentralized pizzeria” named Bitcoin pizza. (An interactive online map shows participating locations around the U.S.A. where pizzas can be ordered with cash or with 0.0003 BTC — either through the web site or through the Uber Eats app.)

“If you want to pay for your pizza in bitcoin, I will gladly take your bitcoin,” Pompliano says in a video posted to Twitter. “I don’t think that you should use your bitcoin to buy the pizza — but we now accept bitcoin.” The five available topping combos even have bitcoin-themed names like “No Keys, No Cheese” and “Satoshi’s Favorite” — and the pizzas are all delivered in a special commemorative bitcoin-themed pizza box. “Every single dollar that I make from this, I donate to bitcoin developers,” Pompliano explains in the video. “I make zero dollars from Bitcoin Pizza.”

“And we’re going to keep building this until eventually we are the single largest independent pizza chain in the United States. And then after we become the single largest independent pizza chain in the United States, we’re going to turn around, and then we’re going to go international.”

A Cryptocurrency-Trading Hamster Beats Warren Buffett’s Performance – and the S&P 500

“What if we told you there was a hamster who has been trading cryptocurrencies since June — and recently was doing better than Warren Buffett and the S&P 500?” asks NPR:

Meet Mr. Goxx, a hamster who works out of what is possibly the most high-tech hamster cage in existence.

It’s designed so that when Mr. Goxx runs on the hamster wheel, he can select among dozens of cryptocurrencies. Then, deciding between two tunnels, he chooses whether to buy or sell. According to the Twitch account for the hamster, his decision is sent over to a real trading platform — and yes, real money is involved.
Last Monday, after 100 days the hamster’s portfolio was up 48%, reports one site, “before Bitcoin tumbled, which brought the rest of the crypto market down with it.” But the hamster’s portfolio is still up nearly 30% since he started trading in June, the article points out, “outperforming Bitcoin, the S&P 500, and even Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.”

The hamster’s business partner adds that profits aren’t yet enough to cover the initial investment on Mr. Goxx’s cage. And there’s other issues…
“Since Mr. Goxx is an honorable business rodent, he must calculate with about 35% tax being subtracted on all his returns, so there is still some work left before he can really talk about making money.”

Coinbase Goes Social by Letting Users Tout Crypto Allocations

America Is Hiring a Record Number of Robots

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Companies in North America added a record number of robots in the first nine months of this year as they rushed to speed up assembly lines and struggled to add human workers. Factories and other industrial users ordered 29,000 robots, 37% more than during the same period last year, valued at $1.48 billion, according to data compiled by the industry group the Association for Advancing Automation. That surpassed the previous peak set in the same time period in 2017, before the global pandemic upended economies.

The rush to add robots is part of a larger upswing in investment as companies seek to keep up with strong demand, which in some cases has contributed to shortages of key goods. At the same time, many firms have struggled to lure back workers displaced by the pandemic and view robots as an alternative to adding human muscle on their assembly lines. Robots also continue to push into more corners of the economy. Auto companies have long bought most industrial robots. But in 2020, combined sales to other types of businesses surpassed the auto sector for the first time — and that trend continued this year. In the first nine months of the year, auto-related orders for robots grew 20% to 12,544 units, according to A3, while orders by non-automotive companies expanded 53% to 16,355.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers Wait 12 Months To Report Vulnerability With 9.8 Out of 10 Severity Rating

About 10,000 enterprise servers running Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect VPN are vulnerable to a just-patched buffer overflow bug with a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. From a report: Security firm Randori said on Wednesday that it discovered the vulnerability 12 months ago and for most of the time since has been privately using it in its red team products, which help customers test their network defenses against real-world threats. The norm among security professionals is for researchers to privately report high-severity vulnerabilities to vendors as soon as possible rather than hoarding them in secret. CVE-2021-3064, as the vulnerability is tracked, is a buffer overflow flaw that occurs when parsing user-supplied input in a fixed-length location on the stack. A proof-of-concept exploit Randori researchers developed demonstrates the considerable damage that can result.

“Our team was able to gain a shell on the affected target, access sensitive configuration data, extract credentials, and more,” researchers from Randori wrote on Wednesday. “Once an attacker has control over the firewall, they will have visibility into the internal network and can proceed to move laterally.” Over the past few years, hackers have actively exploited vulnerabilities in a raft of enterprise firewalls and VPNs from the likes of Citrix, Microsoft, and Fortinet, government agencies warned earlier this year. Similar enterprise products, including those from Pulse Secure and Sonic Wall, have also come under attack. Now, Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect may be poised to join the list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.