US Judge Denies Alibaba’s Request To Stop Alibabacoin From Using Matching Name
A court has ruled this week against the e-commerce giant ’s request for an injunction against the -based Alibabacoin Foundation (ABBC Foundation) due to their similar names, reported yesterday, May 1.
In the beginning of April, Alibaba the ABBC Foundation for copyright infringement, alleging that Alibabacoin engaged in “prominent, repeated, and intentionally misleading” behavior using the company’s name. The initial lawsuit was accompanied by a temporary restraining order against Alibabacoin that was negated by Judge J. Paul Oetken’s ruling, but Alibaba can keep pursuing its lawsuit in spite of the judge’s injunction denial, according to Forbes Middle East.
The ABBC Foundation, which raised more than $3.5 mln in an (ICO), says on its that they are “building the fund security system that is fundamentally improved by using new technology using a secret technique for implementing the blockchain algorithm into the facial recognition hashing process.”
A Google snippet for the ABBC Foundation offers this explanation:
“Alibabacoin Foundation is best Cryptocurrency company with success predicted & amazing whitepaper. This digital currency has secure Facial Recognition.”
The Foundation has maintained the right to their name, citing the Middle Eastern character “Ali Baba” from One Thousand and One Nights as their inspiration rather than the Chinese commerce company. According to an email from the ABBC Foundation sent last month to Forbes Middle East, the word Alibaba is “free of use in its legitimate business activities”:
“[The lawsuit] is either a reasonable or proportionate response to our client’s entirely legitimate use of an inherently generic word which emanates not from China, but indeed from the very region in respect of which your client would seek to prohibit its use.”
A spokesperson for Alibaba told Forbes Middle East in an emailed statement that “Alibaba Group is not affiliated with the ABBC Foundation”:
“The court’s ruling on April 30 was with respect to jurisdiction. We will be submitting a new motion and are confident we will be able to put an end to this willful, concerted and unlawful scheme by the ABBC Foundation to exploit Alibaba Group trademarks.”
that Alibaba was delving into the crypto sector were in January of this year when the company release a statement that their new P2P platform was not cryptocurrency, , or crypto related:
“We reiterate that Alibaba Cloud has never issued a bitcoin-like virtual currency, and it will not host any [cryptocurrency] mining platforms.”
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After an unidentified actor “accidentally” triggered a series of bugs that destroyed approximately $150 million worth of digital currency, the world waits for a substantive answer — is this vulnerability an anomaly? An “I told you so”? Or a humbling opportunity to secure the Ethereum network?
What Happened?
On November 6, “Devops199,” an alleged amateur programmer, set off a chain of bugs on Parity, a popular digital wallet for Ethereum. These bugs affected multisignature, or “multisig,” accounts — “wallets” that require multiple users to sign off with their keys before funds can be transferred.. The place these wallets connect to is known as a “library” contract.
According to Parity, an attempt to fix a vulnerability that allowed hackers to steal $32 million from multisignature wallets in July of 2017 inadvertently created a second vulnerability in the library contract. This allowed Devops199 gain sole ownership of the library that every multisignature wallet used for their code.
After Devops199 realized what had happened, he “killed” (deleted) the code. Unfortunately, this locked all funds into multisignature wallets permanently, with no way to access them.
Because of the functionality of the current blockchain, $150 million worth of ether (ETH), the tradable currency that fuels the Ethereum platform, is now effectively destroyed and inaccessible to anyone.
Among the victims of this bug are several recently successful ICOs that chose to store their funds in a Parity wallet because of its multisig option and compatibility with various hardware wallets.
Parity’s Response (So Far)
On November 7, tweets on Parity’s official Twitter account acknowledged the vulnerability and confirmed that the funds affected are frozen and can’t be moved anywhere.
A day later, on November 8, Parity de-briefed the bug, explaining that it was indeed possible to turn the Parity Wallet Library contract into a regular multisig wallet and become the owner of it, which is exactly what Devops199 did. Parity now has a to check if a user/wallet has been affected by the vulnerability.
Parity’s History of Hacks
This isn’t the first time Parity has fallen victim to a security exploit. Parity’s multisignature contracts were previously the target of three thefts totalling 150,000 ether in July of 2017 (the second-largest hack after the DAO fiasco). And losses could have been exponentially higher. However, the “White Hat Group,” a collection of hackers and activists, was able to intervene and drain the majority of other wallets before they could be compromised as well.
Future multi-sig wallets created in all versions of Parity Wallet have no known exploits. – Official Parity website post following the July 19 hack
Jeff Coleman, an expert in blockchain technologies and currently a researcher and advisor with , described Parity’s response to the July 19, 2017, attack as having been “worrying, to say the least.”
Coleman told bitcoin Magazine that his primary concerns centered around Parity’s inadequate response and its tendency to downplay the significance of the compromise, choosing instead to blame a large number of external causes:
They blamed observers for not finding the bug before it was exploited; they blamed lack of incentivization for observers; and they blamed the Solidity language for not blocking access by default to the functions the [Parity team] failed to protect.
He further noted that Parity seemed to be blaming the complexity of the well-audited wallet (which they still believed to be secure) from which they had originally modified their code. And also that Parity didn’t take responsibility for their own inadequate quality control and audit procedures.
S.O.S.?
Developers in the community are desperately trying to find a fix to the Parity predicament. Coleman believes that “from a technological perspective, there is nothing short of a hard fork [a non-backward-compatible change to the Ethereum protocol] to restore the destroyed funds.”
After the DAO hack in 2016, the Ethereum Foundation had already accepted a hard fork to restore lost funds, with the common understanding that this was a sort of “mulligan” — a one-time fix for a young, developing blockchain. This scenario, nevertheless, divided the Ethereum blockchain into two parts and created Ethereum Classic, the original Ethereum blockchain, backed by a community that vehemently opposes editing transaction history to restore lost funds.
Using hard forks as interventions to “correct” worst-case scenarios like this is highly controversial, especially since blockchains are meant to be immutable. So, it’s difficult to convince the Ethereum community to use a hard fork to rescue one team from a mistake. While many acknowledge sympathy for smaller accounts storing personal ETH, sentiment is not as sympathetic for the 300,000 ETH that belonged to the Polkadot Project, project associated with the Parity team.
Arseny Reutov, an application security researcher for blockchain security firm , affirmed this community sentiment, while acknowledging that hard forks can be solutions. However, he agrees that Ethereum cannot simply hard fork any time there is a problem on the network. He believes blockchains should expect “more and more high profile thefts and incidents,” and that the problem lies in the infant Ethereum platform itself — specifically, in the native Solidity programming language.
If a Hard Fork Isn’t the Answer, Then What Is?
Both Coleman and Reutov believe that the key to gaining the community support necessary to restore funds is to combine the Parity situation with similar situations in which funds have been lost due to various kinds of mistakes. As an example, Coleman referenced those detailed in : “Reclaiming of ether in common classes of stuck accounts.”
Coleman also pointed out that in any of these instances, it must be “completely unambiguous who the original owners of the assets were.” The necessary changes could then be made and packaged together in an “already planned hard fork, such as the upcoming Constantinople fork.”
Even so, restoring funds is problematic. Ethereum core developers must discern which mistake-affected funds will be returned to users. Will all funds be returned or only a select few — or will this be a ~500,000 ETH learning experience?
