The O.M.B.'s Porn Problem

CRYPTODAY 029

1. On Wednesday, I wrote about how the Optical Media Board (OMB) had begun requiring permits from customers who were buying crypto hardware devices from overseas. This prompted leading wallet manufacturer Trezor to temporarily suspend all shipments to the Philippines. I made the joke that OMB should rename themselves to Digital Utilities & Media Board (D.U.M.B.), but I don’t think I realized how apt that name was until after I had already published the newsletter. So, allow me to take you on a brief journey into strangeness this rainy Friday morning.

2. This journey begins, as do most things, with a Google Search. One of my close friends tipped me off that if you do a Google search for “OMB” you’ll notice something quite strange with the search results. Try it for yourself!

   

   That’s the official OMB website at the top of the results, but right beside the official email address and telephone number are the words “Dubai escort porno sex” etc. What’s going on here? Has the OMB website been hacked? Was it the work of a disgruntled Trezor customer? Let’s dive in to the code on their actual website.

   

   Ladies and gentlemen, what you’re looking at above is the HTML code of a government agency that reports directly to the Office of the President of the Philippines. Yes, those are hidden links to porn sites. Of course, you won’t see it when you visit their homepage. You need to be looking at the source code, which on most browsers is as easy as right-clicking and selecting “View Page Source.” These kinds of hidden links are viewable by search engines and page-scraper bots (and over-eager crypto writers like me, I guess), and are meant to add supporting information to a web page without distracting the viewer from the main content. But they are valid links nonetheless!

3. Is it possible that the OMB is just completely oblivious to these invisible links? The last time their chairman was in the public eye was this last May, and he was showing off his high-end motorcycles on TNC (jump to the 49-min mark in the link). I have a feeling he probably wouldn’t have been doing that if he knew his website was, at that very moment, directly linking to pornography and prostitution. I used the WaybackMachine to look at previous versions of the OMB webpage, and as far as I can tell, these invisible links have been there since April 22nd. The WaybackMachine, the world’s archive for all of web-based information, has been taking snapshots of OMB’s porn links for OVER THREE MONTHS now, and with any luck it will preserve these shenanigans until the end of time. (And you can help guarantee that by donating to WM here!)

4. How does stuff like this happen? It’s too subtle to be an external blackhat hacker. Typically those types of attacks result in either the website going down completely, or the homepage being defaced beyond recognition. One possibility is that the OMB had a vengeful web developer who left a parting gift hidden in their website. But then why add such random links? Surely there are more Philippines-specific pornography and/or prostitution websites to choose from. (Or if you really wanted to rile people up, just put a single hidden link to Nas Daily.) In all seriousness though, the more likely explanation is that it was a developer error, and there was no one qualified to double-check their work. The OMB website is built using Wordpress and it’s notorious for having sketchy third-party plugins that add “unexpected” content to a given website. Yesterday, I sent an email to info@omb.gov.ph reporting the issue; we’ll see if they ever get around to correcting it.

5. Yesterday, the long-awaited Ethereum “London” hard fork finally happened. I was watching the countdown from the final 100 blocks on watchtheburn.com, and it kicked in at 8:36pm Manila time. Within the first 3 minutes, about 2.5 ETH had been burned. If you’re not sure what all the hubbub was about: the Ethereum hard fork changes the way that transaction fees are paid. One of its biggest impacts was that instead of simply paying fees to the miners, it would “burn” some of them, permanently removing them from the circulating supply. Effectively this reduces the overall Ethereum supply by somewhere between 1% and 3% per year, and conjures up a scarcity that it never had before.

   

6. Within the first hour, over 150 ETH had already been burned, and by the time I woke up this morning, it was over 3,000 ETH gone forever. Although many deflationary coins exist, seeing it happen on the world’s busiest blockchain is just something else. In case you needed a more traditional measure, this is like ripping up $2,000 every 10 seconds, or $4.2B a year at current prices. Another way to think about it is that it’s *adding* $4.2B a year in equivalent value to the remaining ETH supply, because there’s now LESS of it. At least a few people share this view, as the price of $ETH rose about 10% since last night and continues to be on a healthy up-trend.

7. In the weirdest example of post-crypto capitulation I’ve ever seen, the 90-year-old furniture company Ethan Allen has voluntarily renamed its stock market symbol from “ETH” to “ETD.” Over the past year, its stock has been seeing spikes in its price of up to 80%, but only because US investors thought they were buying Ethereum.

8. The fine folks at Bitpinas and I have been collaborating on a Tagalog translation of Cryptoday, to be released every morning the day after the English one goes out. So far we’ve done two of them, and we’re asking for the community’s feedback to continue improving the output. We’re also looking for crypto enthusiasts who are fluent in other dialects (Bisaya is our first target). The goal here is NOT to turn this into a moneymaking enterprise, but to produce timely, relevant news in the languages that Pinoys are most comfortable reading. That being said, we would not be opposed to sponsors who want to fund the translation work. I will not accept payment for the original Cryptoday newsletter itself, but it’d be great if the translators could all be compensated for their contributions. (If we can’t find traditional sponsors, we may have to tokenize this darn thing and I’d rather not have to go through all the mental gymnastics to make that happen.)
   

See you all on Monday, cryptofam, and have a great weekend!