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turborooton Did Stack Exchange staff members assist in the apprehension of Ross Ulbricht?

It's interesting to note from page 30 of the criminal complaint, StackOverflow was able to record "Ulbricht [changing] his registration email [...] to 'frosty@frosty.com'".

Why do sites like StackOverflow keep audit logs of your account information?

turborooton Ask HN: why are Bitcoin trading fees so high?

Because they can.

Most FX brokers do not "exchange money", that is in the sense that you can withdraw the quote currency. Because of this, they don't have to deal with money laundering.

FX brokers and MtGox also have different business models. Brokers usually make money off their spreads, slightly adjusting their quotes in their favor. Traders on MtGox trade directly with other users, not against the company. This attracts different crowds.

Fiat is also not as volatile as Bitcoin. A .35% fee on Forex would completely devastate profits. Meanwhile, Bitcoin rises and falls 10% on a good weekend.

Bitcoin exchanges would be comparable to stock exchanges like NYSE or NASDAQ, except volume is lower in the tens of magnitudes.

turborooton CoreOS Vagrant Images

Vagrant supports VMWare, but not Parallels yet.

turborooton Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony

Oops, I didn't see what I had typed in. Thanks for correcting me. :)

turborooton Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony

Before CoinLab shifted gears and got sued by MtGox, what this guy got fired for was exactly CoinLab's startup: monetizing games through Bitcoin mining.

Needless to say, with Bitcoin ASICs on their way back then, this wasn't exactly a sustainable business model.

turborooton Ask HN: Which VPN service do you trust to have your back?

I use Private Internet Access.

You can create an account anonymously and pay in Bitcoin, and not leave a paper trail. That's exactly what I did.

Their policies state that they do not log, but I personally find this questionable. Much torrent traffic goes through their network, and I couldn't imagine how they respond to complaints sent by media companies to their US servers. They claim that they use "proprietary technology" to deal with abuse, but that seems only to be with blocking outgoing DoS attacks.

However, policies of "not logging" aren't particularly new to [many providers](http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anon...), so I'm not really concerned.

It may also be useful to note that they've been supportive of the Bitcoin community. They host BitcoinTalk, and were also one of the first VPNs to accept Bitcoin.

turborooton SEOmoz hacked?

The answer is not black and white, although there are certain indicators that make an email very likely to be malicious.

In this case, record the ultimate destination of the link in an isolated browser session (to prevent a possible CSRF attack), then make your judgement from there.

turborooton Google Removes Search Box From Results Page? When Using Chrome's Omnibox

This was on for a while when I was on Chrome's dev release channel. It annoyed me, so I switched to beta.

turborooton The fall of apple

Welcome to 2013, where footers and headers make up 90% of the content. :)

turborooton Edited version of the Linode log file for April 15th

Why? Is it not appropriate? I assumed I could offer hosting alternatives since my post's parent author was asking for "thoughts".

I don't work for Joyent, and I just signed up for them 2 days ago. Apologies if my post seemed like blatant advertising.

turborooton Edited version of the Linode log file for April 15th

I signed up for Joyent yesterday, and was quite impressed with the performance. It's probably on par with Linode.

The price is reasonable: $21/month for a 512 MB instance, and free 20,000 GB bandwidth!

In addition, they offer freaking 2-factor authentication! That says a lot when the only ones I know of offering such are AWS and SoftLayer.