Is There Real Gold in Fort Knox

IS THERE REALLY ANY GOLD IN FORT KNOX? FORMER US MINT DIRECTOR COMES CLEAN

At the recent Whitman Expo in Baltimore, former US Mint Director Edmund C. Moy who ran the mint from 2006-2011 opened up on visiting Fort Knox during his tenure as Mint Director.
Is there really any gold left in Fort Knox?  Mr. Moy’s first thoughts on viewing the inside of Fort Knox:
“These bars at Fort Knox look like dirty gold…One of the first things was, Is this real gold?”
Former Mint Director Edmund Moy tells his story and reveals what he saw with his own eyes when he toured the mint in the MUST WATCH clip below:

On whether he saw any gold inside Fort Knox:

“I’ve been to Fort Knox, I’ve been INSIDE Fort Knox, and I’ve seen the gold. So I know that its actually there!…I can personally vouch that there is gold at Fort Knox, and I have personally seen it!”

On how much gold remains in Fort Knox: 
“There’s alot of gold…I can’t tell you how much is in there or how they’re organized, but there’s alot of bricks in there!”

Moy indirectly supports the theory that most of the good delivery bars have already been leased or swapped and removed from Fort Knox and only dirty gold remains: 
“One of my first observations about the gold there, when you think about modern 400 oz  good delivery bars that are made in Switzerland, you think of shiny gold.  These bars at Fort Knox look like dirty gold…One of the first things was, Is this real gold?”

However, what Mr. Moy fails to address is who and how many parties hold title to the likely hyper-rehypothecated pile of gold remaining inside Fort Knox vaults.

Edmund Moy’s full thoughts on touring Fort Knox:

Fort Knox Secret Contents:

Russian Americans Caught Up in the Middle of Loyalty to Mother Russia or the United States of America

Russian Americans Caught Up in the Middle of Loyalty to Mother Russia or the United States of America
SmithBits Talk Radio Post Editorial
By Kenneth Howard Smith
IFS, March 17, 2014

MEMPHIS TN (IFS) -- When it comes to choosing sides, the question is whose side are you on?  What a dilemma for Russian Americans.

It's not going to be like the old days of the Japanese War where we put Japanese Americans in concentration camps and stole their land and businesses.  Or will it?

Loyalty to Mother Russia or to the United States of America?  As President Putin draws a counter line in the sand and starts his own sanctions of US personnel, goods and services to counter reactions to President Obama's executive orders, these two players are going to duke it out in real time.  The costs are going to be high and very expensive for the Russians.

Putin will cut the gas lines to Europe to start, but he needs the capital to pay his troops and keep the Russian economy from tanking, as the Russian stock markets are taking severe hits as we speak.  It all starts very small and then one day in very near future, it becomes a very big thing, and one finds themselves way over their heads, then you want to fight, then you have to fight and then you fight from keep from dying in a war that you have nothing invested in.

"Into the valley of death rode the mighty 600."  They knew it was a suicide ride.  They did it to show loyalty to their leader and country.  They did it for pride.  But only the winners get a chance to write the ending of the story.  Maybe the true Russians will stop Mr. Putin from making a big mistake and pull him back across the line in the mud, and have him rethink his position that effects everyone worldwide.

This writer is sure the Motherland can do the "hard times dance" and weather the storm.  However, these are different times.  The Russians buy and drive American cars build in Russia.  They like the 7-11 stores and MacDonald's.  They like Starbuck's, Visa and MasterCard.

President Putin will start his executive order of "nationalizing" these companies assets, and his expulsion of United States citizens from Russia, and other citizens that oppose his orders.  It always start very small.  And as with Pussy Riot, it's very personal.  Nothing to do with national security, just Putin's ego.

The new beginning of the Cold War?

Yes!  It's the same old war that never went away.  Let's face it.  We never put any trust in the Russians, only tolerated them.  You know the old mafia saying. . . "Keep your friends close, and  your enemies closer."

As the Russian people has got use to real money, they are going to feel the heat when their bank accounts start coming up very short, and they will not be invited to the big parties of the G-7 (8) and the Russian voices will be silenced in world affairs.  What a price to pay for a small piece of dirt.

This writer believes that President Putin is going to march his army through Western Ukraine and into Poland.  Putin has nothing to loose.  Remember he beats up on girls in ski masks for singing.  He does not give a tinkers damn about world opinion.

This writer feel sorry for the new Russian Americans in this country, because if it comes down to boots on the ground and the United States has to show a force, these folks will be under the microscope by the NSA, FBI and every alphabet agency in the US.

All battles that are lost starts from the inside out.  If you have terrorists all ready planted here when the fighting begans, you are fighting a two front war to start.

Andy Greenberg Forbes Staff

Covering the worlds of data security, privacy and hacker culture.

SECURITY 3/04/2014 @ 10:47AM 6,534 views

Another Bitcoin Startup Tanks After $600,000 Theft

Mt. Gox may have become the biggest business to collapse within the Bitcoin economy when it declared bankruptcy last week after a massive theft of its coins. But it won’t be the last.

On Monday night Bitcoin startup Flexcoin announced that it would be shutting down following the theft of 896 bitcoins from its servers, worth close to $620,000 at current exchange rates. “On March 2nd 2014 Flexcoin was attacked and robbed of all coins in the hot wallet,” a note posted to the company’s website reads, referring to the portion of its coins that were in active use and so more vulnerable to theft. “As Flexcoin does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss, we are closing our doors immediately.” The company is working to coordinate a return of the bitcoins it kept in “cold storage”–a more secure but less liquid stash of its digital currency–to users who can claim them.

Flexcoin, which launched in the summer of 2011, acted as a cloud service for sending, receiving, and storing bitcoins, calling itself “the world’s first bitcoin bank.” Just days before its shutdown notice, it reassured users that it hadn’t lost any coins in the collapse of Mt. Gox, the first and once-largest Bitcoin exchange that declared bankruptcy last week after 850,000 of its bitcoins were stolen by hackers, 750,000 of which belonged to users. “We hold zero coins in other companies, exchanges etc.,” read a note on the company’s twitter feed. “While the MtGox closure is unfortunate, we at Flexcoin have not lost anything.”

The theft that shut down Flexcoin represents a tiny loss compared with Mt. Gox’s half-billion-dollar plus debacle. But it’s yet another reminder that the digital cash Bitcoin represents can be as irreversibly stolen as any cash, and its lack of regulation leaves users with little recourse when their accounts are emptied. Most Bitcoin security experts recommend users store the private keys that allow the spending of bitcoins on their own hard drive, or better yet a cold-storage hardware wallet. When it comes to more convenient web-based services whose security is out of users’ direct control, bitcoiner beware.

Implosion of Bitcoin Exchange Spawns Mutant Digital Currency

• BY ROBERT MCMILLAN
• 03.05.14
• 6:30 AM
• As big-name bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox descends into bankruptcy — the victim of a $460 million hack — the outlook is bleak for those with money in the company.

  The courts in Japan, where Mt. Gox is based, may not recognize bitcoin as a currency, meaning they’re unlikely to catalog customer assets at anywhere close to full value. And even if they did, it may be difficult for anyone to retrieve even a fraction of what they had in the exchange. The bankruptcy systems here in the real world just aren’t prepared to deal with bitcoin.

  That’s why some people want to build new bankruptcy systems just for the Mt. Gox debacle. Basically, these are digital currencies designed to manage the digital currency that has vanished inside Mt. Gox. No, this isn’t the easiest concept to wrap your head around, but such is the world of bitcoin, an incredibly malleable and powerful online technology.

Bitcoin, Meet Goxcoin

• As Mt. Gox was imploding, a website sprang up, Bitcoinbuilder.com, which let steel-stomached speculators buy the rights to assets locked inside the troubled exchange. And now, there’s a new effort to turn the whole sordid mess of IOUs into a brand new digital currency.

  It’s called Goxcoin. And according to Adam Levine, one of the backers of the proposal, they let speculators and Gox customers create a market for assets lost inside the company. Basically, if you’re freaked that the bankruptcy courts will never recover the money you stored in Gox, you can sell Goxcoin. And if you think those funds will eventually be recovered, you can buy Goxcoin. “It’s about providing options and liquidity to people who have neither and likely won’t for a long time,” says Levine, who is the host of a popular bitcoin audio show, “Let’s Talk Bitcoin.”

  Using a technology called Mastercoin, the Goxcoin people would mint a brand new digital currency, a strange hyper-speculative bitcoin derivative, that would itself be backed by claims to bitcoins held in Mt. Gox’s accounts. So one Goxcoin would represent one bitcoin, temporarily vanished in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy. Recovery date and value are to-be-determined.

  “It’s about providing options and liquidity to people who have neither and likely won’t for a long time” 
  –Adam Levine

  For now, it’s just a proposal. No Goxcoins have been issued. The big trick, of course, is to get Mt. Gox and its CEO Mark Karpeles to participate. That seems like a long-shot, but Levine is undeterred. There’s one big benefit to the Goxcoin model: It gives anyone an incentive to track down the 850,000 missing Mt. Gox bitcoins, which, because of the nature of bitcoin, are still stored somewhere in a massive online ledger that is completely public. If they can be located and returned to the Mt. Gox asset pool, that will drive up the value of Goxcoins. Bitcoins can be stolen, naturally, but because all bitcoin transactions happen in an open public ledger — known as the blockchain — any coins that are identified as having been stolen from the troubled exchange can be tracked forever.

The Hunt For the Missing Mt. Gox Coins

• “The reality is that those coins are in someone’s possession, and they shouldn’t be. So, legally, they’re not the property of that person,” Levine says. “Essentially, you have a situation where there’s going to be a years-, possibly decades-long recovery effort that’s really going to push forward the science of forensics on the blockchain.”

  Although the bitcoin community is now hot on the trail of the missing Mt. Gox bitcoins, it’s not clear that they’ll ever find them, says Nicholas Weaver, a researcher with Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “There are a hundred different ways that the bitcoins could have been stolen and unless Gox releases their database, we will probably never know how they went missing,” he says. According to Weaver, even if the stolen bitcoins have been tracked, once they’ve been spent, they are probably not recoverable.

  Another wrinkle: one of the backers of Goxcoin is Michael Keferl, a managing director at Mandalah, the marketing consulting company that was advising Gox at the time of its meltdown. That has caused some bitcoin observers to be skeptical of the whole Goxcoin initiative. “I think the confusion about his company, Mandala, and Mt. Gox is really unfortunate because Michael is a great guy in a bad situation,” Levine says.

  Adam Price had 60 bitcoins (worth more than $40,000 as of Tuesday evening) in the Mt. Gox exchange when it imploded. He applauds the idea behind Goxcoins, but he doesn’t think that Mt. Gox will play ball. In any event, he has already sold his lost Gox assets on Bitcoinbuilder.com. The night, one week ago, that Mt. Gox pulled its exchange offline, he offered to sell the rights to his 60 bitcoins. He found a buyer and received 12 bitcoins in exchange for these lost assets. And right now, that looks like a good price. If Price waited until yesterday to sell his Mt. Gox assets, he would have received just 2.5 bitcoins.

  “I am very lucky I got what I got,” he said in an e-mail interview. “The fact is, there is zero regulation and if a half billion dollars disappears and someone just says ‘it was a hacker and the money is gone,’ then the money is gone.”
  

  Robert McMillan is a writer with Wired Enterprise. Got a tip? Send him an email at: robert_mcmillan [at] wired.com.
  • 
    

Autumn Radke - Head of Bitcoin Online Currency Exchange Found Dead in Singapore

Head of Online Currency Exchange Found Dead in Singapore

BY JAVIER E. DAVID

Autumn Radtke, the CEO of an upstart online currency exchange, died last week under mysterious circumstances at her home in Singapore.

Radtke, the U.S.-born head of First Meta, was found dead by local police Feb. 28, with the cause of death yet to be determined. In a statement on its website, First Meta said the company "was shocked and saddened by the tragic loss of our friend and CEO Autumn Radtke."

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the company's director and nonexecutive chairman, Douglas Abrams, said the exact cause of Radtke's death was "still under investigation."

Prior to taking the reins at First Meta in 2012, the 28-year-old Radtke had once closely worked with technology giant Apple, to bring cloud-computing software to Johns Hopkins University, Los Alamos Labs and the Aerospace Corp., according to her biography. She then took up business development roles at tech start-ups Xfire and Geodelic Systems, according to information on her LinkedIn profile.

First Meta bills itself as a clearinghouse for the purchase and exchange of virtual currencies, including bitcoin.

Her death comes as troubles swirl around the nascent cryptocurrency industry, and amid a rash of suicides in the financial industry as a whole.

Last week, the world's largest bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox, imploded; meanwhile, nearly $500 million in client funds vanished overnight. Elsewhere, untimely demises unrelated to bitcoin have claimed the lives of bankers at JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Zurich Insurance Group.

First published March 5th 2014, 1:09 pm

Nearly 150 Breeds Of Bitcoin-Stealing Malware In The Wild, Researchers Say

---

Andy Greenberg Forbes Staff

Covering the worlds of data security, privacy and hacker culture.

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With a potentially massive hack of the Mt. Gox exchange still unfolding, it’s no secret that cybercriminals see a gold mine in cryptocurrencies. But a new study by security researchers shows just how quickly the cottage industry in Bitcoin theft is evolving: Nearly 150 types of malware are actively stealing bitcoins, more than a hundred of which were created in just the last year.

At the RSA conference in San Francisco, researchers from Dell’s SecureWorks security division released a new paper Wednesday tallying those strains of cryptocurrency-focused malware, based on their own clients’ infections and other antivirus data feeds. As of this month, they counted 146 currently active distinct species of Bitcoin-stealing malware, up from 45 a year earlier and just 13 in early 2012.

SecureWorks’ chart showing the correlation between Bitcoin’s price increases and the creation of new Bitcoin-targeting malware.

The study shows, not surprisingly, that the creation of new Bitcoin malware tracks loosely with Bitcoin’s exchange rate with the dollar. The rate of new malware discoveries jumped as high as 30 new classes of Bitcoin-stealing programs a month at the end of last year, when Bitcoin’s price cracked a thousand dollars. “With the increase in the price of Bitcoin, we also saw an increase in the number of malware samples flooding into the wild,” says SecureWorks researcher Pat Litke. That rate of malware creation has since fallen to around 13 new species in February as the price of Bitcoin has fallen, in part due to Mt. Gox’s technical problems.

To steal victims’ bitcoins, most of the malware that SecureWorks found simply searches out common file types such as “wallet.dat” that might store private keys that control a user’s coins. Any keys the malware finds are exfiltrated over FTP or HTTP connections to a remote server, which uses them to transfer the victim’s bitcoins to their own wallet.

But some of the malware goes further, the researchers say. To steal the coins of users who encrypt their private keys with passwords, many of the Bitcoin stealing programs also included keyloggers designed to eavesdrop on users’ typing. Even more tricky are malware types that wait for users to copy a Bitcoin address they want to send bitcoins to into their clipboard. When the user tries to paste the address, the malware replaces it with a different string, irreversibly sending the currency to the malware operator’s wallet.

That last method never sends data to a remote server, so it can be much harder to detect, SecureWorks’ researchers say. In fact, they tested a range of antivirus scanners on their malware samples and found that roughly 50% went unnoticed.

More than 99% of the malware targeted Windows, not Mac or Linux. For now, other cryptocurrencies also aren’t targeted nearly as often as Bitcoin, according to the study. Only 9% of the malware sought to steal Litecoin in addition to Bitcoin, for instance, and more obscure cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, Freicoin and Anoncoin were stolen by less than 1% of the malware.

To keep coins safe from the growing influx of cryptocurrency-focused attacks, SecureWorks researchers advised that Bitcoin holders use a so-called “split” wallet, where the necessary keys to spend the majority of a user’s coins are kept on a separate computer that’s not connected to the Internet. To move those coins, the user generates a transaction on their everyday-use machine, carries it via USB stick over to their secure machine where it’s cryptographically signed with the private key, and then brings the signed transaction back to the online machine where it’s broadcast to the Bitcoin network.

The process may be more time consuming, but it’s far safer from Bitcoin-stealing malware. And SecureWorks points to new “hardware wallets” like theTrezor wallet scheduled to become available sometime in the next month, which are designed to make that more secure process much more convenient.

“Ultimately, I’d rather spend a little more time making a transaction,” says SecureWorks researchers Joe Stewart, “than have all my bitcoins stolen.”

Women behaving badly in LinkedIn exchange

By Peggy Drexler

updated 5:50 PM EST, Sat March 1, 2014

LinkedIn drama! How to avoid it

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Job seeker posts sarcastic, mean reply from marketer and it goes viral
• Peggy Drexler: Marketer was wrong but young jobseeker was wrong to post it
• Drexler: Young women need mentors, and marketer failed to help her
• Drexler: Posting on social media to humiliate someone is a form of bullying

Editor's note: Peggy Drexler is the author of "Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family" and "Raising Boys Without Men." She is an assistant professor of psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University and a former gender scholar at Stanford University. Join her onFacebook and follow her on Twitter @drpeggydrexler.

(CNN) -- This week, veteran Cleveland marketer Kelly Blazek learned the hard way that you should watch your words -- especially when you put them in writing -- after a nasty digital lecture she delivered to a young job seeker went viral.

In her sarcasm-laden message to recent graduate Diana Mekota, who'd asked to connect with Blazek via LinkedIn, Blazek wrote: "Your invitation to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky. Wow, I cannot wait to let every 26-year-old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job. ... You're welcome for your humility lesson for the year."

Peggy Drexler

It was hardly a lesson learned. Mekota countered by posting Blazek's response online asking people on Facebook, Reddit, and Imgur to "please call this lady out." She then forwarded Blazek's message to a local radio station and appeared on air to discuss.

Blazek's words were, of course, undeniably, and likely unnecessarily, harsh, especially considering Blazek has made her name as an advocate for Cleveland jobseekers, creating and updating a popular local jobs bank with some 7,300 subscribers. Last year, in fact, she was named the city's "Communicator of the Year."

Yahoo! group manager's backlash is viral

It's a time when many women struggle to find mentors. In a 2011 survey of more than 1,000 working women, one out of five said they've never had a mentor at work. And the "queen bee syndrome" is alive and well. Blazek might have aimed to correct what she considered Mekota's breach of protocol with kindness rather than condescension and cruelty.

Instead, she seemed to take glee in putting Mekota in her place. "I love the sense of entitlement in your generation," she wrote. "And I therefore enjoy denying your invite." She ended the note with "Don't ever write me again."

Certainly, it's hard not to wonder why Blazek -- a professional in a field where image matters, a lot, and an avid social marketer besides -- didn't anticipate the possibility that Mekota might share the note with others, although it turns out this was not the first time Blazek had delivered such an admonishment. But she's hardly the only one at fault here.

Blazek has since been the subject of national outrage; many have suggested that her career is dead
Peggy Drexler

By herself choosing not to ignore Blazek's words, and instead shame her for them in a most public manner, Mekota acted with malice, and caused the older woman significant damage. Blazek has since been the subject of national outrage; many have suggested that her career is dead. In the wake of the exchange, she issued a public apology and has deleted most of the contents of her blog and shut down her social media accounts, including the Job Bank twitter that served to help thousands of people find work.

No question, Blazek lashed out first, with unprofessional behavior that can only be described as bullying. An undoubtedly kinder, and wiser, alternative, of course, might have been to simply ignore Mekota's request.

But Mekota responding in kind makes her no less a bully. Perhaps it's not surprising: Bullying is wont to breed more bullying. And social media provides the opportunity to make anything public with ease and efficacy -- a ready and willing vehicle for public shaming.

But just because you can doesn't mean you should.