Choir Spreads Bitcoin Love to Japan, Japanese Translations to LocalBitcoins

Finnish academic male choir KYL has been touring Japan. The tour included 5 concerts, from which 4 were fully booked. The tour also included lots of other finno-japanese cultural exchange.

The special kicker in this case was that at the same time, the Choir was spreading Bitcoin propaganda to Japan, as LocalBitcoins was sponsoring the concert. LocalBitcoins was prominently displayed in the tour t-shirts, as well in the concert promotional material.

At the same time, Japanese translation was made to LocalBitcoins, making it more usable for Japanese audience.

Localから始まる世界革命。

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Unexpected Downtime Solved, Infrastructure Upgraded

Our server had gone down yesterday. The reason might be hardware failure. We are researching the issue and trying to get the site back up.

The LocalBitcoins Team

Update: the service is now up. The reason behind the downtime was network hardware failure. Now we have moved our servers to another hosting provider.

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New Market Variables for Pricing : Coinbase, Bitpay, Kraken

The following variables were added to localbitcoins pricing engine:

- Kraken (EUR)
- Coinbase (USD)
- Bitpay (multiple currencies)

You can see the list of all possible variables in the pricing guide.

Happy trading!

If you can't invent a good price equation yourself, you can always ask a wizard. [picture unrelated]

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LocalBitcoins Trading API

Hello developers,

LocalBitcoins is proud to announce automated trading support on both online and local trades. Previously only buying Bitcoins with cash was supported through API.

In addition there is a full dashboard API available to cultivate and monitor your currently active and past trades.

The expanded API is available immediately. Please refer to the API documentation for the up-to-date details.

The API enables faster, more reliable trading. You can use the API to automate and enforce your business logic and earn more, or just to lose the hassle in filing the tax report.

Your feedback is important in the direction and focus of the development of the API. Please do continue to contact about your issues and wishes about the API as well as about your use cases either to our support form or by joining our chat.

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Attack against LocalBitcoins infrastructure 3.5.2014

LocalBitcoins received a very dangerous attack against the site infrastructure on Saturday 3.5.2014.
For now

• All user data and Bitcoins are safe;
• The site will be down for a while as the system is being rebuilt

Details

LocalBitcoins hosting provided received a request to restart the LocalBitcoins.com website server and give access to the server console (root) on Sat May 3 13:32:27. LocalBitcoins team did not initiate this request. For now, it looks like the request was made using spoofed email addresses and other weakness in the hosting provider support system.

• LocalBitcoins team was alerted about the abnormal activity when the hosting provider restarted the server.
• The attacker gained a root access to the server for ~40 minutes before the attacker was kicked out and the server shutdown.
• All data on the website server is encrypted. Manual actions are needed to make this data readable, so the attacker could not gain access to the data even when having a server console access. 

It is very unlikely that the attacker gained access to any data;  LocalBitcoins is still performing full investigation on the matter.

• Bitcoins in hot wallet and cold wallet are safe, as LocalBitcoins runs its bitcoind and wallets on a separate server.
• LocalBitcoins team has started to rebuild the website server on fresh hardware.

LocalBitcoins team will make further announcements when the investigation proceeds and the site becomes available again.  We expect to spend at least 24 hours on this. LocalBitcoins team apologizes the issues the downtime may cause to the users.

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Male Choir Singing and Bitcoin - Perfect Combination?

One would think that male choir signing and Bitcoin don't have much in common, but that is about to change. In an effort to promote Bitcoin to the vocal music enthusiasts, LocalBitcoins is supporting the KYL male choir tour to Japan.

The tour consists of four cities, including Hiroshima, Takamatsu, Saku and Tokyo.

The repertuaire includes Japanese songs, traditional finnish songs as well as international classics. Style ranges from pop to national romantic.

Tickets for the first concert, held in Helsinki, Finland can be acquired with Bitcoin. It is not yet known if tickets can be bought for Japanese concerts in BTC, but hopefully we will figure out .

LocalBitcoins.com will also be translated in to Japanese, to spread the Bitcoin adoption in Japan.

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LocalBitcoins security updates and tips

Bitcoin users are high value targets for cyber criminals. Thus LocalBitcoins is improving the site  security continuously to keep Bitcoin community safe. Please read in this blog how to secure your LocalBitcoins account and what LocalBitcoins team is doing to keep up the security.

Keep up your basic security

Here are some basic rules for securing your user account.

• Enable two-factor authentication, either by mobile app or paper codes. More than 99% of the attacks against you can be prevented with two-factor authentication. It takes only few minutes to set it up.
• Do not share your password across different websites.
• Do not publish your email address, associated with your LocalBitcoins account, on any website. Do not get involved transactions outside the LocalBitcoins site messaging, e.g. in Skype. The malicious users often use these channels to circumvent the security features present on LocalBitcoins.
• Do not use the website from a shared computers or devices, like ones in public internet cafes, as they may have keyloggers installed to steal your user credentials. 
• Always when logging in to the website, read the browser address bar and check that you are logging into https://localbitcoins.com and not a phishing domain. Make sure the spelling is localbitcoins.com exactly, as the phishers, especially email phisheres, often register domain names resembling localbitcoins.com domain name.
• If possible when accessing user accounts with Bitcoin wallets, do this from a dedicated computer you have reserved for financial tasks only. Do not use this computer for other tasks. Do not install third party software and browser addons you cannot trust 100%. This greatly reduces the risk of getting malware infection on the computer.  
• Keep most of Bitcoins safe offline in a cold wallet. We recommend specialized Bitcoin wallet applications like Electrum for this purpose.

New LocalBitcoins security features

We have rolled out some new user facing security features this week.

• You cannot use the same LocalBitcoins logged in session across different IP addresses. This prevents session hijacking attacks against LocalBitcoins users, but may also cause minor inconvenience for the legit users. This is especially case if you use LocalBitcoins on a mobile device where your IP address may change often.
• LocalBitcoins may interrupt your normal website actions in the case there is a chance that the action  might not be started by the legit user account owner. In this case you will get an email verification to ensure that it was you who really wanted to perform the action.

Some latest security threads affecting Bitcoin users

Here are some latest threads Bitcoin community has found targetting Bitcoin users. Keep your eyes open for these.

• Chrome extension stealing your Bitcoins by modifying the Bitcoin transaction receiving address secretly.
• Rooted iOS devices (iPhone, iPad) are subject to malware attacks which may also steal Bitcoins (though no evidence found yet).

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