So you’ve got your PGP Key and you want to get it signed? Excellent. That’s how we build this Web of Trust.

Why would I want my key signed?

If you consider your PGP key as your digital identity then you must see the need to have this verified. The more signatures the more you are trusted.

Will I sign your key?

Sure will. All I need is for you to contact me to arrange a meeting. I would appreciate it if you also signed my key at the same time.

What do I need to bring?

I use a verification form that I have released publically. You can either add your details and print it or hand write your details. I normally have a few spare when I meet people so you can always ask if you’ve not got one.

Just bring two forms of identification. I’ll accept most things, but for reference:

• Passport
• Driving Licence
• Utility Bill
• Bank Statement
• Military Id Card
• National Id Card
• Student Id Card
• Birth Certificate

I will not accept:

• Self printed online banking statement
• Letter from your grandmother

Do you charge for this service?

This is a good question. The answer is a difficult one to answer.

I may ask for you to contribute towards travel costs either in full or part. This depends on your location and how I am feeling.

I may also as part of the verification process ask to take a £1 card payment from you. Once verified I will refund this amount to you as I only want to ensure you are able to authorise a payment. I will process this payment at location via mPOS.

What information do you store?

I store nothing. I only want to see your identification documents, I don’t note any details and my memory isn’t good enough to remember them anyway.

I will retain the paper document we complete with our details on. I store these until I get to a computer I can sign your key from. Once signed this document will be shredded, pulped, compressed and then burnt.

I don’t live in your city/country can will you still sign my key?

I take these on a per request basis. Due to the nature of this, I will have to look carefully at your details and others who have signed your key. I reserve the right to charge for this service as it requires due dilligence on my part. This charge would not exceed £10 or the equivilent in your country and should be made via Bank Transfer to further confirm your identity. This will not result in a signature of absolute trust, you will receive a casual signature as I cannot absolutely gaurantee your identity.

What keys have you signed and have signed you?

Key Statistics.

I have a Raspberry Pi which I like to toy with. I have another one that runs Rasbmc, but that’s just for watching movies on.

Well I was updating my public key records for PGP/GPG and it occured to me that I should be able to run a small key server myself.

I have Raspbian on my Pi which is a Debian based distro. Therefore it has the vast majority of the repositories that standard Debian has available to it.

First think I did was setup no-ip because my ISP doesn’t provide static IPs to residential customers.

So from my laptop I start with these commands:

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ssh [email protected]

Replace x.x.x.x with your Pi’s IP. Provide the password to login default is raspberry.

Now download and install No-IP.

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wget http://www.no-ip.com/client/linux/noip-duc-linux.tar.gz
tar xf noip-duc-linux.tar.gz
cd noip-2.1.9-1/
make install

You will be prompted to put the login details for your account at No-IP. You will be asked how often to update, I sugest 360 which is 1 hour.

Now we need to set No-IP to run at boot.

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sudo nano /etc/rc.local

Simply add the following line and close and save.

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/usr/local/bin/noip2

Now we have a host we can use and we are ready for the main event.

As SKS is in your base repositories you can use.

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apt-get install sks

Now build the database.

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sks build

Now you need to get SKS to run at boot also.

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sudo nano /etc/default/sks

Find the line.

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initstart=no

Change it to.

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initstart=yes

There you go. You have now got an SKS server running on your machine.

If you are looking for the web front end, then you can use the files from syslog.tv.

Create your directory.

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sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/sks/www/

Now copy the index file to it.

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wget http://syslog.tv/downloads/sks-index.html -O /var/lib/sks/www/index.html --no-check-certificate

There you go. All setup and running.

You can sometimes access my key server here. Though I will probably give up and do something else in a week.

After joining the Buttercoin development team, I was asked to move the gh-pages to it’s own repository.

Whilst this is a really simple thing to do, it surprised me the lack of clear documentation on how to do this.

Go like this.

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git clone -b gh-pages https://github.com/yourname/reponame.git temp

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cd temp

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git remote rm origin

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git remote add upstream https://github.com/yourname/newrepo.git

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git branch -m gh-pages master

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git push origin master

You can now delete the gh-pages branch from your repository.

So you are playing around with Github and you forked a repo. Good for you! Only the original author updated their repo and you need to rebase your fork to get the new commits.

Just do the following steps and you’re done.

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git clone https://github.com/youruser/reponame.git

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cd reponame

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git remote add upstream https://github.com/sourceuser/reponame.git

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git fetch upstream

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git rebase upstream/master

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git push -f origin master

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is the law under which Aaron Swartz and other innovators and activists have been threatened with decades in prison. The CFAA is so broad that law enforcement says it criminalizes all sorts of mundane Internet use: Potentially even breaking a website’s fine print terms of service agreement. Don’t set up a Myspace page for your cat. Don’t fudge your height on a dating site. Don’t share your Facebook password with anybody: You could be committing a federal crime.

I don’t live in the USA, however I massively support this. If you are in the USA please enter your details.

You ill see a modal overlay on this site when you first visit that will promote this. Just do it!

So I have seen a lot in the last day or so about the bubble popping.

After unceremoniously rage quitting /r/bitcoin after it became more like /r/circlejerk I was not aware of Today’s pointless posts.

I was on IRC and I was told about this post and I had to read twice to see if anyone was actually serious.

I think this subreddit should seriously consider having suicide hotline info posted.

Im not joking. This is not a troll. We know there have been countless pie in the sky “investors” in BTC over the past couple of days. Shit Ive read more than one comment about how we’ve got college kids taking STUDENT LOANS to buy bitcoin when it was at 150+. There is no way more than one person wont kill themselves over this. Might as well make the info known to maybe save a life or two. I know this will get downvoted into oblivion by the bitcoin religious nuts who think this currency will change the world - because they fear it will only make BTC look bad or make it lose value - tough shit.

I was amazed to see how many people had invested more money than they could lose into Bitcoin. I have personally not bought a single coin, nor have I sold one. My current holdings are not tiny and not large.

It just shocks me when people see a highly unstable commodity (Is Bitcoin a currency or a commodity?) and they truly believe the price can only go up. Do we forget about every single economic crash is history?

I’m sure we will see a few news articles over the coming days. Let’s see how much people have lost.

I have been playing with Travis CI for a little while as I see the amazing advantage of using CI. One of the downsides I saw was the lack of .NET development testing.

Well I fixed that! Well, okay… sort of.

We need to do a few things to make it work, that are a bit tough to do to start with.

First the language. I would love to see the option for C# in the future, but for now we will just say it’s C.

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language: c

Now we need to install Mono which is described on their own site as:

“Mono is a software platform designed to allow developers to easily create cross platform applications. Sponsored by Xamarin, Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. A growing family of solutions and an active and enthusiastic contributing community is helping position Mono to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.”

Obviously it’s not as complete as Microsoft’s, but it’s good enough for me.

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install:
  - sudo apt-get install mono-devel mono-gmcs

Now we simply call xbuild and pass in the solution.

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script:
  - xbuild PseudonoymMatching.sln

Does it work? Check it out for yourself.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a new kind of money. It’s the first decentralized electronic currency not controlled by a single organization or government. It’s an open source project, and it is used by more than 100,000 people. All over the world people are trading hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin every day with no middle man and no credit card companies. It’s a startup currency which has never happened before.

Bitcoin is the first digital currency that is completely distributed. The network is made up of users like yourself so no bank or payment processor is required between you and whoever you’re trading with. This decentralization is the basis for Bitcoin’s security and freedom.

Email let us send letters for free, anywhere in the world. Skype lets us make phone and video calls for free, anywhere in the world. Now there’s bitcoin. Bitcoin lets you send money to anyone online, anywhere in the world for less than a cent per transaction! Bitcoin is a community run system not controlled by any bank or government. There’s no wallstreet banker getting rich by standing between you and the people you want to send and receive money from.

Bitcoin is more efficient than all competing currencies. This will drive its adoption in the same way computers were adopted, in that computers made people more efficient in competing in the marketplace. A currency has value by it being widely used. Bitcoin is a startup currency with a deflationary bootstrapping economy. Its use spreads by providing the speculator incentive.

Bitcoin is going to be the biggest opportunity for innovation that the world has seen since the industrial revolution. An idea whose time has come. - We Use Coins

Now that’s out of the way, let’s move on.

Bitcoin Mining

Back in the early days you could mine Bitcoin on your CPU as a small time operation. They were pretty worthless, so not many people jumped on. Then the value grew and people wanted more and more, so they invested in bigger setups and the power needed to mine grew and grew. Now we have people producing specialised hardward (ASIC).

Well I have moved all my mining operations from my home mining rigs over to Pyramining.

Why have I done this?

Because the price tag for mining is just too damn high! Also Butterfly Labs is a scam and will never deliver!

How does it work?

It’s pretty simple. You register and enter the address you want them to pay you to. They then give you an address to send Bitcoin to. They use your bitcoin to buy mining equipment and mine on your behalf.

They obviously get to keep the hardware when your time runs out and they can use this to fund themselves. So it’s win-win if you ask me. No more stupidly high electricity bills and noise of mining rigs running.

Disclosure

Pyramining requires you have a referrer to sign up. They do not allow you to register without one. The links I have included in this post are with my referal link and I will gain a small fee for you signing up.

If you don’t believe me, you are welcome to visit Pyramining without the referal link.

So I was doing some spring cleaning and I came accross a CD that had come with me when I moved. It wasn’t labelled so I decided to check it out.

It had a load of files related to back when I used to develop hacks/MODs for phpBB.

I’ve no idea where else on the internet you might find them, so I decided to deploy them to some new repositories on Github.

phpBB and I

I left the phpBB community about 10 years ago. I have my reasons, and I will not go into further discussion on the matter. This code will not be maintained or supported. If you want it, have it. If you fork it, I will NOT* accept pulls. Count this as a storage of old code. If any others show up I’ll submit them. It’s been so long since I used phpBB I doubt I even remember any of it.

I put this guide together a while ago and I decided to publish my gists here. So here you go.