Here is to warn any one is a client or thinking of becoming a client of the newly accepting Bitcoin VPS Host1Plus. I will write a full review of them and some much better hosts on my blog but I just thought I'd give some people here some heads up so they wont lose there money / data.

I had an account with them for less than a week. Luckily I only used it to do benchmarks of their service and didn't have there any vital service or information since yesterday they completely shutdown any access to the VPS server I was paying them

Their excuse for blocking was that I broke their TOS by not providing my full billing account details.
When I wondered why do I need to provide my personal information when I clearly don't have any billing account (I paid for a month in advance with Bitcion) They clearly stated that they use this information to disclose it to police and any other authority in case of an abuse report. Not a warrant! an abuse report and not only to the police but to anyone they might think is an appropriate authority)

And when I wondered about a refund as their TOS clearly show I'm entitled for the decided to close the ticket since I'm "twisting around what we try to tell you."

I will send them a link for this post maybe they have some comment since I'm "twisting around what we try to tell you."

Here is the copy of some of the correspondence I had with them -


From: HOST1PLUS Sales Department <sales@host1plus.com>
Subject: [#GNQ-499-96789]: Regarding your order
Hello,

I want you to understand that the payment method chosen has nothing to do with the requirement to provide valid personal information. We always require valid and matching information, no matter what the payment method is going to be used. Try to imagine what would happen if we get an abuse report with a request to provide full contact information to the police or any other appropriate authorities. That's the reason why the contact information has to be valid and up to date.

If this caused you any inconvenience, then please accept our most sincere apologies. Please let me know if you have changed your mind and we will update your contact information so you will be able to continue using our services.

--
Kind Regards,
Dainius L.
Level 2 Support
HOST1PLUS


From:
Subject: Re: [#GNQ-499-96789]: Regarding your order
Hello,
So if I understand correctly you are collecting unnecessary user data so it could be shared with various third parties ?
Do you have a specific list of third parties or is it just any one who care to file an abuse ?
Can you point me to the specific area in your terms and condition that allows you to do so ?

I found a lot of terms allowing to terminate an account for what ever reason you might want, but I didn't find any place that allows you to share the billing information with any one else, also please note that your TOS talking specifically about a billing account, if you are using this information for any other perpes like you stated above you should update your TOC.

Also please note section 2.2 in the TOS [REMOVED LINK TO TOS] which staits that account termination will not be applicable for a refund in case of intentional property damage.

Did I cause any damage ? did you get any complaint about my account ? was my account involved in any of the activities mention in section 2.3 ?
as it was clearly not I understand you are going to refund me for the hosting price ?
I doubt if you do so (cause by the low quality of your service and servers I'm sure you hog every dollar) but if you do that would probably be the only positive side for your service.

Sincerely yours,
Yoni Jah


From: HOST1PLUS Sales Department <sales@host1plus.com>
Subject: [#GNQ-499-96789]: Regarding your order
Hello Yonjah,

I am very sorry to see that you are so intent to find faults with everyone and putting words into our mouth, and twisting around what we try to tell you.
I can only advise you to read our terms of service and privacy policy, which clearly contradict your statements.

For your convenience, I will narrow it down for you: We like to know who we are doing business with. The way our clients pay has nothing to do with that.
Why we want to know is obvious, as there is a lot of different people out there, not all with good intent.

I will close this discussion now as it is clearly going nowhere. We have our 'house rules' in the form of ToS.
You are fully in your right to dislike them, disagree with them or think of them whatever you may think of them.
They still are our Terms of Service, and they are there to protect both us and all our other clients and both we and our clients follow them.
This is a simple truth with any other hosting company out there and doesn't make us special in any way.

I hope you have a nice day.


With best regards,

Richard B.
HOST1PLUS Support Manager

how can you see transaction info in btc-e ?
I'm only testing it in blockchain info.

No it haven't. but I don't think it will ever clear up.
but its not a big issue for me and I think in general withdrawals are now working fine.

I was trying to test how gox handles the transaction fee.
this fee should go to the miners but I noticed that if you make a transfer between to gox addresses the transfer
is done internally in gox without ever going throe the bitcoin chain. but if you'll choose to pay a fee gox will remove the fee from your balance
even thou there is no real transfer involves.
so I tried to test what will happen if I'll make an actual transfer with no fee and if it will be delayed, unfortunately I made a transfer of less than 0.01 bitcoin with no fee not knowing this is not possible in the by the actual bitcoin protocol.
so this transfer is not going to be ever proccessed.

I'm still on the chat with gox support (now that its backup) and they told me its still being processed (and that I shouldn't make any more small transfers).
since I don't think it will ever go throe, I'm now waiting to see if gox will reverse the transfer and fix my balance once their system will decide to cancel the transfer.
 
 

what do you mean re attempted ? I don't have the coins on my balance any more
can I send then again and they'll magically appear ?

do you have more info about that issue ?
and why would they shutdown their chat support and wont replying tickets on this issue ?
would have been a lot simpler if they'll just explain the situation to users

its more than 30 hours here and I'm still waiting.

thanks for your help.
I don't really know what to do next, I guess I can only wait until they bother replying my ticket.

Hi thanks for the reply. would you mind trying to open a chat support with them ?
for some reason I can't do it (It says "Sorry, no agents are available. You may submit a ticket below for further help.") and I'm wondering if it's just for me or for everyone

I made a really small withdrawal from mt gox yesterday, just to test something and the transaction didn't pass yet.
I'm not talking about getting ait registered into a block but  it doesn't seem  like they even sent the transfer (they removed the coins from my balance thou).
I contacted gox support and they told me they'll get back with me with an answer in 24 hours.
24 hours have passed and now for some reason you can't contact them by chat and they don't reply my support ticket.

this amount is too small to care about but I was wondering if any one had similar issues lately or know why they would shutdown their chat support (its been like that for several hours now).

I just installed Electrum for android for the first time and the software crashed after creating the wallet.
I looked at the error in the console and it seems like the ElectrumGui class in gui/gui_android.py is trying to access
self.wallet which is undefined (line 974).

I saw all throe the code wallet is being accessed as global variable so I removed the self and it seems to be working now.
also did so in line 463 which called self.wallet even thou this function is not part of any class.

BTW is there a git repository for the android version ?

As you can see from previous post I plan to write a guide on how to use remastersys.
Unfortanantly I'm not going to have alot of available time this next couple of weeks so it will take some time.
any way you can subscribe to my blog to get updates

Your completely missing the point .

YOU SHOULD NOT TRUST MY DISTRO

But you probably shouldn't trust your tools that much.
since this distro is manly intended to offline use.
it will have either to rewrite the tools it using to generate known addresses instead of random ones.
or it will have to manipulate your hardrive installing a trojan or root kit on your normal OS that will steal your wallet
you use on your computer.

validating your hard drive integrity is not trivial but not that hard to do.
and you already said you can validate the tools you use.
so if you do both this processes, you will get a much more trusted liveCD then any non bitcoin related liveCD
since you validated it and the tools installed. unlike ubuntu live cd where you have to install all your tools on each
boot (and how do you know they haven't changed ? or that you can trust your connection ?) or a persistent usb stick who might be tempered or just updated with untrusted new versions.

I think it will be much more worthy and maybe even less difficult. for an attacker to hack bitaddress.org github account and servers (I don't know about bitaddress servers but github had security issues in the past and probably will have in the future) and just catch a few days ride on there servers.
then to build a tempered liveCD who might have at best a few hundred users ( building a normal liveCD was quite trivial and took me about a week, but the time it would take to make a tainted one will probably be weeks or months and will probably require a team of strong hackers so it will be able to pass various verification process, and it will probably be caught quite fast because whoever will test it will know what to look for)

but I don't really care if you use it or not.
I made this CD in the favor of the community, and I don't have any gain out of it (except felling good about myself that people use my software and hopefully get some donations to keep my work but up until now it didn't even cover 1/100 of the cost and I doubt if it ever will) .
But you are not giving any service for the community by scaring people of. you are only sending them to what is surely a much more dangerous software not because they cannot trust the authors of the software but because most of them don't know shit about security like ssl and probably have an OS that is full of Trojans and backdoors).

So as I wrote on reddit, if you really want to help the community and newbies coming to bitcoin, assuming you have the technical background test this CD and verify it safe.

Yea trust is a major issue.
But I'm not sure if you can trust an open source software 100% either.
Or for that matter any software who gets updated automatically.

The author could just send a malicious update once he thinks its worth it.
and it doesn't even have to be him, what if his system gets compromised, and some else releases an update in his name ?

so the chain of trust in Bitcoin is very limited.

thats why I  think a liveCD is one of the most secure methods were going to have since it will always stay in the same state.
I guess its better to make on your self and not to trust any one else but for most users that wont be an option.
so if you can get one from a trusted source you should be safe (as per release bases)
thats one of the reason I created an OTC account so I could gain trust in the community and hopefully in the end people will
be able to trust me for future release.

but that doesn't mean This current release can't be validated.
I wrote a small post of how I would have test a liveCD like that on reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c9ht1/bitbuntu_r2_an_ubuntu_livecd_with_all_your/
and I highly encourage any one known in the community to give it a go and validate this specific release.
if you approve it you can ad your public key/sha256 hash to the iso so people will be able to test its the same iso
and I haven't changed it (the disadvantaged is that this has to be done again for each release)

Anyway I hope that for my next release when I'll add Armory etotheipi, will be able to validate it has not been modified.
And I think most people will be able to test gitub bitaddress.org source vs the local saved source and see its the same.

I know that if any one finds an issue with this CD he will notify the community (which is exactly what I  would have done)
but if you use this CD and test it and find it to be legit, it will be very helpful to let people know, since it as important users wiil know what they can trust as to what they cannot

Truecrypt and keepass2 are preinstalled.
About printers I'm not sure if this is possible for me at the moment.
If your printer is not supported (and I think ubuntu supports many out of the box ) you can go online just for the printer install or just save your driver to USB stick if you think it will be more secure.

taiping you might wanna check remastersys -
http://www.remastersys.com/
it what I used to make this distro, it is not that hard to use.
I hope to write a tutorial on how to use it but I have too much stuff on
my mind at the moment

it is based on ubuntu 12.10.
I saw there is a deb file so I think I'll be able to install it but I haven't tried yet.
I'll wait a bit to see what other suggestions people have, and I'll try to release a new version next weekend.
I'll PM you if I can't install it for some reason.

Ok so I'll add Armory and Tor on the next release.

What about bookmarks ?
I'm sure there are many important links I missed

can you please elaborate a bit about armory features ?
and what advantage does it have over Bitcoin-qt and Electrum
(I think if you have both of theme they cover all the features you might need for a one time use but if many people ask I will add
it Armory as well).

You have a litecoin-qt available on the cd (I just didn't create an icon for it so to not confuse any newbies, you also have
ltc-minerd which is the litecoin version of cpuminer)

I'll check again for next release but I think when I checked it didn't look like it will offer any extra features.
I'm trying to make this iso small enough to fit on a regular cd but maybe its to large any way now.

I guess Tor is important and I'll try to add it. but why would you need a text mode browser what the advantages ?


you have unetbootin http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
which will turn any livecd iso to a bootable usb.
let me know if you manage to use it and if the usb runs on mac (it shouldn't matter but I don't have a mac to test it on)

I released an update for my liveCD that comes pre installed with all your Bitcoin needs -

• offline version of bitaddress.org
• vanitygen
• Bitcoin-qt
• Electrum
• cpuminer (bitcoin and litecoin)
• Bitcoin Live chrome extension
• Bitcoin bookmarks
• Bitcoin backgrounds

I decided not to add other clients  like Armory and Multibit since they require extra components like JRE and I preferred to keep this version as slim as possible.

If you think there are any more tools I should add or links to include I'd be happy to hear about them.

you can download it here -
https://blog.non.co.il/index.php/bitbuntu-livecd/

Please keep in mind I don't care if trust this ISO not to steal your coins.
I'd probably wouldn't trust this if I wasn't the one who made it.
If your a newbie don't download anything you can't trust.
be sure that if I wanted I could have backed a CD that will steal all your coins from your computer and the ones you generate here.
So only use this LiveCD for testing or if you think you can trust its author.
If your a computer professional test this ISO if you find any proof of malicious activity warn people, but if you don't let other people know they can trust it
other then that I'm not going to pay any attention to "I don't trust you" comments

In theory its safer to save your coins in your own wallet, and paper wallet is considered the most secure way of doing so.
so if your not planning on trading your coins too often its better to take them out of gox.

Yet I wouldn't rush to get all my coins out of gox If i still want to trade. Gox have been hacked once and I think they will do their best to prevent a second incident.
also they compensated all the victims of the first attack for the amount that was stolen so if your account does get hacked and its not your fault (its not somebody who guessed your password because
you chose a week one or hacked your pc and got your gox credentials) and you can prove it (which probably mean it will happen to many accounts and not just one) you might get compensation from mt gox.
which is some thing you will never get if someone manage to takes coins from your private address.
I don't want to be to clear about a compensation from gox since I have no connection to gox and I can't talk on their behalf, but in the end they have an interest of keeping their clients trust even if someone will hack theme.