This article is silly and wrong. Probably those blocks are mined by a new mining pool, one that someone hasn't implemented transaction handling into. There is

This article is silly and wrong. Probably those blocks are mined by a new mining pool, one that someone hasn't implemented transaction handling into. There is a free market for transaction fees built into Bitcoin, and any miner is free to ignore transactions as they will, it's always been that way. It's not an 'attack', it's just an economic system built in. Miners will almost certainly demand more bitcoin for their work in the future than they do now; the way I think of it, the network itself is pre-emptively fronting a baseline transaction value to miners right now. Eventually that will be phased out, and people who wish to transact will pay the burden of getting their transactions secured. C'est la vie. Until then, move along, the article does not, in any way, detail a 'real threat' to bitcoin. It is annoying (in that it slows transaction acceptance and validation) that someone doesn't wish to mine transactions, but if it ever became a large threat, clients could adjust to ignore blocks from known bad-behavior miners, bringing them into line. Or, I suppose, miners could value same-height blocks with more transaction fees in them. I'm not sure if this would impact other attack vectors, though.