Bitcoin, Ghostery and other toys

Good morning people. It’s the Angry Systems Administrator with more toys I’m playing with. Today I’m going to talk about Bitcoin and Ghostery.

First Bitcoin.

I heard about Bitcoin about 3 months ago and didn’t pay to much attention to it. Yesterday, while listing to Security Now with Steve Gibson, he mentioned that he had 60 bitcoins. I also read that someone had just lost $500,000 worth of bitcoins.

$500k? Hey! That’s REAL money!

I started digging into this and found that there is a bit of a market for it. You will now see on the lower left of the screen a little bitcoin generator. It’s harmless and you can turn it off if it bothers you.

As I understand this, it simply uses cycles on your computer that you aren’t using at that moment. As long as the window is open to one of our blog pages, you will generate a bitcoin. It’s a cheap and easy way to support us if you are to cheap to send us money. 😉

I’m still trying to figure out how to generate these bitcoins locally. It looks like it works best if you have a powerful GPU on your video card. As near as I can tell with about 3 hours of research, using the computer’s CPU is actually slower than using a video card GPU. I’ve heard about how GPU’s are blowing huge holes in passwords and other security systems so it makes sense.

Obviously I have a lot more to learn about how this all works. Also, if you don’t want to keep our blog open in your browser, you can always follow this link and let the generator run. I have it running in Google Chrome and have that minimized to the tray and out of the way. It does require Java to work though. I’ll need tot talk with the ~~Clown Prince of Stupidity~~ Angry Webmaster about putting the links on the main site. On the blog I”m using a WordPress plugin si it’s rather simple to set up. The main site is a rather old fashioned one and doesn’t use all the latest bells and whistles.

The next item is a browser plugin called Ghostery. If you’re familiar with NoScript, then you will like this tool as well. Again, this was something I heard about on Security Now. I installed it and have been playing with it. Basically it tells you who and how you might be tracked on a web site. It also allows you to block any trackers that might be sending your private information out. It’s a free tool and rather fun to play with.

Right now I see this as an adjunct to Adblock and NoScript. If it works out well I may use just Ghostery, but at the moment I don’t see that happening.

Now you might be asking “Why they Hell are you telling your readers how to block the ads running on your site?”

It’s simple really. We run the ads to try and pay for the site, nothing more. We have never made any money from them and barely make enough to keep the site online. If you don’t want to be bothered by them, then please, feel free to block them.

As an aside, (And the Angry Webmaster may go into this in more detail), someone was reading about the Webmaster’s trials and tribulations on bringing his better half, Mrs. Webmaster to the United States. He sent in a note asking about the ads he saw offering visa kits. No one here saw these ads due to the way the aggregators we use handle things.

We don’t recommend or not recommend any of the services listed here with the exception of stuff by Amazon.com. We tend to list those items manually and have either used them or looked at them.
(Off in the darkened part of the Anger Central offices, the Angry Accountant is screaming and tearing what remains of his hair out over my explaining that it’s OK to block our ads. HA!)

Have a good one.

~The Angry Systems Administrator~