A reporter for Newsweek says she’s unmasked the mysterious Japanese-American man responsible for inventing Bitcoin, the world’s most widely used digital cryptocurrency. In an article published on the magazine’s website Thursday morning, Leah McGrath Goodman recalled the events of a two-month investigation she undertook recently in an attempt to unearth facts about Satoshi Nakamoto, the man who invented Bitcoin in 2008 but has avoided the media entirely ever since.
Author: mediahitman
EU leaders have threatened Russia with sanctions, which could include visa bans, asset freezes and various economic restrictions unless it engages in direct talks with the coup-appointed Ukrainian government. As a first step, the EU has halted G8 summit preparations and visa-free talks with Russia.
The United States’ second-largest coal producer is on track to settle a case with the federal government that will see it pay $27.5 million in fines and spend $200 million cleaning up illegal toxic discharges in five states. As part of the proposed settlement, Alpha Natural Resources and its 66 subsidiaries will set up and manage wastewater treatment systems in order reduce discharges from 79 coal mines and 25 coal-processing plants into water systems in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.
More than 100,000 individuals in Maryland could become disqualified from owning their registered gun under a bill currently under consideration by state lawmakers. According to the Associated Press, the Maryland House of Delegates is debating a proposal that would link the state’s gun and criminal registries, enabling law enforcement officials to more effectively seize firearms in the possession of those convicted of felonies or violent crimes.
According to Tech in Asia, Singapore-based Bitcoin exchange platform First Meta’s 28 year old CEO Autumn Radtke committed suicide. Reasons are currently unknown. [UPDATE: Tech in Asia has updated the article to emphasize that suicide is only suggested and not certain] First Meta is a Singaporean start up company that runs a exchange platform for virtual currencies such as Bitcoin.
Automated license plate readers used by car repo companies, for example, collect billions of personal records per year, which contribute to vast databases that can be used by law enforcement, insurance companies, banks, and the like, with few limits. BetaBoston, working with the Boston Globe, detailed one Boston repo company’s data collection abilities, reporting that New England Associates Inc. can collect $200 to $400 for each vehicle found by an automated reader attached to an unmarked car. The company says it can typically add 8,000 license plate scans to its database in Texas each day.
Federal prosecutors are dismissing 11 of the 17 counts against Barrett Brown, an American author and activist who has spent the last year-and-a-half awaiting trial behind bars in Texas. United States Attorney Sarah R. Saldana filed paperwork on Wednesday requesting that the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas throw out count one and counts three through twelve from two of the criminal indictments unsealed against Brown in 2012.
Facebook has announced that pressure from gun control groups and the New York attorney general has convinced the company to crack down on users who use social media to sell guns illegally. The social media behemoth said Wednesday that Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, will limit access to posts about gun sales and trades for users under the age of 18. Gun control advocates have called on the company to institute such an action in order to prevent people from buying firearms while subverting a background check.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., reconvened a hearing Wednesday that began more than nine months ago to investigate whether the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting conservative groups, a scandal that was exposed in 2013. The problem was, he didn’t have a witness to answer his questions – again.
The head of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, alluded to unspecified legislation on media leaks as being forthcoming, potentially within weeks, during remarks at a cybersecurity panel on Tuesday. During an event at Georgetown University Alexander commented that leaks by former NSA contractor by Edward Snowden, which have subsequently been published by media outlets around the world, had compromised the country’s ability to secure against cybersecurity threats.
The American Civil Liberties Union wants to learn more about any secret surveillance gadgets used by Florida law enforcement agencies after uncovering proof that police there relied on one type of spy tool upwards of 200 times without permission. Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, wrote on Monday this week that his organization has filed public records requests with nearly 30 police and sheriffs’ departments across the Sunshine State in hopes of having documents unsealed that would disclose how those agencies use certain surveillance tools to track down cell phones.
In Connecticut, tens of thousands of gun owners are believed to be committing felonies by not registering their weapons in compliance with a new state law. Second Amendment advocates, however, say authorities “don’t have the balls” to enforce it. Legislation enacted after the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT requires that gun owners registered military-style rifles and high-capacity magazines with state officials by the end of last year. But only a few weeks after that deadline came and went
A new state-of-the-art headband is being developed by Tufts University scientists that could help facilitate communication between the human brain and computers. The new technology – currently being crafted at the university’s Human Computer Interaction Lab – would be capable of scanning an individual’s brain activity, determining whether the person is mentally aware enough to handle the task at hand, fatigued, or even bored with what they’re doing.
Facebook is reportedly in talks to take over an American-based aerospace company, and if so the social networking site could soon have its fleet of drones delivering the internet to currently unconnected people across the world. TechCrunch was the first website to report this week on rumors that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is interesting in acquiring Titan Aerospace — a deal that is believed to be worth as much as $60 million.
UVB-76, also known as The Buzzer, is the nickname given by radio listeners to a shortwave radio station that broadcasts on the frequency 4625 kHz. It broadcasts a short, monotonous About this sound buzz tone, repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, for 24 hours per day. On rare occasions, the buzzer signal is interrupted and a voice transmission in Russian takes place. It has been active since at least the late 1970s or early 1980s, when the first reports were made of a station on this frequency. Its origins have been traced to Russia, but although…
A Bitcoin spinoff known as Mazacoin has been adopted by a confederation of seven Native American tribes as their national currency. The Oglala Lakota Nation has expressed hope that it will draw the tribes out of poverty. “I think crypto-currencies could be the new buffalo,” head of the Lakota Nation, Payu Harris, told Forbes. “Once, it was everything for our survival. We used it for food, for clothes, for everything.
Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin says ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has sent a letter to Putin asking him to use military force in Ukraine to restore law and order. “Under the influence of Western countries, there are open acts of terror and violence,” Churkin quoted the letter from Yanukovich to Putin in the third emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
Fresh off of winning $80,000 from the school that employed him, a former headmaster did something you’d expect pretty much anyone to do: He told his family. As a result, he still hasn’t seen a dime from the settlement.