Federal authorities are making arrests and seizing funds with the help of new tools to identify criminals through cryptocurrency transactions. From a report: James Zhong appeared to have pulled off the perfect crime. In December 2012, he stumbled upon a software bug while withdrawing money from his account on Silk Road, an online marketplace used to hide criminal dealings behind the seemingly bulletproof anonymity of blockchain transactions and the dark web. Mr. Zhong, a 22-year-old University of Georgia computer-science student at the time, used the site to buy cocaine. "I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited," he later said in federal court. After the first fraudulent withdrawal, Mr. Zhong created new accounts and with a few hours of work stole 50,000 bitcoins worth around $600,000, court papers from federal prosecutors show.

Federal officials closed Silk Road a year later on criminal grounds and seized computers that held its transaction records. The records didn't reveal Mr. Zhong's caper at first. Authorities hadn't yet mastered how to track people and groups hidden behind blockchain wallet addresses, the series of letters and numbers used to anonymously send and receive cryptocurrency. One elemental feature of the system was the privacy it gave users. Mr. Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4 billion. In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years.

Mr. Zhong's case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the U.S. has seized more than $10 billion worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service -- in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail.

Google has announced that it'll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. From a report: In a blog post, the company says it's "planning to wind down" Currents, and that it'll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat's version of a Slack channel or Discord room. Google says that it's making the change so users won't have to work in a "separate, siloed destination" -- instead, they'll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. Google says it will begin winding down Currents on July 5th, with data available for export until August 8th, 2023, when it will no longer be available.

Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global said on Thursday that it is working with Chinese carmakers to develop its own robotaxis, which it aims to put into service by 2025, revealing a concept one with robotic arms it called "Didi Neuron." From a report: The company said that it is collaborating with multiple new energy carmakers in China on developing robotaxis. "We hope they can enter Didi's network and provide services by 2025," Didi Autonomous Driving COO Meng Xing said at a company event that was livestreamed online. "We hope they will be domestically produced. We hope the supply chain is controllable, and even 90% of the key components inside can be domestically produced," he said. He also showed off a robotaxi concept car called "Didi Neuron", with robotic arms that can help passengers pick up luggage.

The Ethereum blockchain, the most important commercial highway in the digital-asset sector, successfully implemented a widely anticipated software upgrade. From a report: The so-called Shanghai update enables investors to queue up to withdraw Ether coins that they had pledged to help operate the network in return for rewards, a process called staking. Tim Beiko, who helps to co-ordinate the development of Ethereum, posted on Twitter on Wednesday that the upgrade is now "official." The network revamp -- also known as Shapella -- is designed to let people exit an Ether staking investment and has stirred debate on whether the appeal of the largest token after Bitcoin will increase over time.

"Ethereum is updating and navigating with great skill -- so far anyway -- and cementing its position as the No. 2 crypto," said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg Opinion. He added that the network is "moving to the future much faster than Bitcoin." About 1.2 million of Ether tokens -- worth approximately $2.3 billion at current prices -- are expected to be withdrawn over the next five days, according to researcher Coin Metrics. Some $36.7 billion of Ether is locked up for staking, data from Staking Rewards shows.

According to a recent study involving a sample of 28,646 Chinese people, high-speed rail projects were found to increase individual happiness, albeit not by much. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: It can increase happiness, especially for people who live in regional capitals, rural areas, men and the elderly, but only by an increase of .076 on the happiness scale of one to five. To put it another way, as the study does, "The coefficient accounts for 1.997 percent of the mean of happiness." This is statistically significant, in the strict definition of whether results are due to chance, and therefore a publishable scientific finding. But it is hardly meaningful in terms of how much high speed rail influences the happiness of Chinese people. I mean, come on. Two measly percent?

In the "policy implications" section, the study authors pose a tantalizing question: "What is the significance of economic growth if it cannot effectively improve residents' happiness?" While the two percent happiness finding may be marginal, they're at least asking the right questions.

Now Australian online businesses that put up hurdles to make it harder for customers to unsubscribe from their services may face a crackdown from the federal government, with plans to be unveiled later this year. The Guardian reports: The practice of "forced continuity" or "subscription trapping" involves building design features of a website or app in a way that impedes a customer's ability to cancel a particular service. The chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Gina Cass-Gottlieb, said in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday a prohibition on unfair trade practices would help protect consumers and small businesses "exposed to manipulative practices designed to get them to agree to unfair or unfavorable contract terms".

The consumer watchdog has called for new powers in Australian consumer law to crack down on such practices since 2017. A spokesperson for the regulator said subscription traps can cause "significant harm to consumers and some small businesses." "These practices make it difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions after fixed-term periods, with the consequence that many subscriptions roll over to paid subscriptions despite consumers no longer utilizing or wanting them," the spokesperson said. The report cites a discrepancy in the steps required to canceled an Amazon Prime subscription. In Europe, "there is a simple two-step process," reports the Guardian. "But customers in Australia must navigate four convoluted steps, with the wording and location of the cancellation button changing between each screen."

This is due to Australia's lack of unfair trading practices laws that exist in Europe and other countries.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An Amsterdam court today ordered one of the largest adult entertainment websites, xHamster, to remove all amateur footage showing recognizable people in the Netherlands who did not consent to be featured on the site. The ruling followed complaints raised by the Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse, known as EOKM, which identified 10 videos where xHamster could not verify it had secured permission from amateur performers to post. The court found that this violated European privacy laws and conflicted with a prior judgment from the Amsterdam court requiring porn sites to receive permission from all performers recognizably featured before posting amateur videos.

According to EOKM director Arda Gerkens, this ruling will require xHamster to clean up its site and is part of EOKM's larger plan to stop all porn sites from distributing amateur footage without consent. The Amsterdam court has given xHamster three weeks to comply with the order and remove all footage posted without consent, or face maximum fines per video up to $32,000 daily. Lawyers assisting EOKM on the case said the verdict had "major consequences for the entire porn industry," including bigger sites like Pornhub, which already was required to remove 10 million videos, as Vice reported in 2020. "Now it's xHamster's turn," Otto Volgenant of Boekx Advocaten said in EOKM's press release, noting that 30 million people visit xHamster daily.

On xHamster, only professional producers and verified members can upload content. The website requires everyone who creates an account to upload an ID and share a selfie to become verified. Before any verified member's upload is made public, xHamster moderators -- a team of 28 who use software approved by EOKM to identify illegal content -- conduct a review to block any illegal content. The website's terms of service require that each uploader provides a consent form from each person recognizably featured in all amateur content. Hammy Media told the court that it had already removed all violating content that EOKM had flagged in the case and provided assurances that moderators check to ensure the uploader is the same person as the performer. However, in his order, judge RA Dudok van Heel wrote that "it is sufficiently plausible for the time being that a large amount of footage is being made public on xhamster.com, of which it cannot be demonstrated that permission has been obtained from the persons who appear recognizable in the picture."

The first beta of Google's Android 14 OS is available to download today, introducing new features focused on system navigation, privacy, performance, and user customization. From a report We already had a good idea of what to expect thanks to the first two developer-only previews, but the beta release is the first opportunity for the general public to test the changes. Gesture navigation has been updated to include a more conspicuous Material You-themed back arrow that adjusts to complement the device's theme or wallpaper. Aside from arguably being more aesthetically pleasing, the updated back arrow is designed to help users better understand Android 14's predictive back gesture experience, which now previews the screen users are navigating to within applications.

Android 14 also introduces a new system share sheet -- the page that opens when you tap to share content. This allows developers to add custom app-specific actions to the top of the share menu. Google describes this as a "superior" experience compared to the existing Android share sheets in which share targets (the app you're sharing content to) are always sorted alphabetically. The new share sheet also uses more app signals to determine where the direct share targets that appear toward the top of the page should rank (though it's not clear what exactly those signals are).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday proposed sweeping emissions cuts for new cars and trucks through 2032, a move it says could mean two out of every three new vehicles automakers sell will be electric within a decade. From a report: The proposal, if finalized, represents the most aggressive U.S. vehicle emissions reduction plan to date, requiring 13% annual average pollution cuts and a 56% reduction in projected fleet average emissions over 2026 requirements. The EPA is also proposing new stricter emissions standards for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks through 2032.

The EPA projects the 2027-2032 model year rules would cut more than 9 billion tons of CO2 emissions through 2055 - equivalent to more than twice total U.S. CO2 emissions last year. Automakers and environmentalists say the administration is moving quickly in order to finalize new rules by early 2024 to make it much harder for a future Congress or president to reverse them. Then President Donald Trump rolled back tough emissions limits through 2025 set under Barack Obama but the Biden administration reversed the rollback. The agency estimates net benefits through 2055 from the proposal range from $850 billion to $1.6 trillion. By 2032 the proposal would cost about $1,200 per vehicle per manufacturer, but save an owner more than $9,000 on average on fuel, maintenance, and repair costs over an eight-year period.

An anonymous reader shares a report: About a year ago, Google announced its Assured Open Source Software (Assured OSS) service, a service that helps developers defend against supply chain security attacks by regularly scanning and analyzing some of the world's most popular software libraries for vulnerabilities. Today, Google is launching Assured OSS into general availability with support for well over a thousand Java and Python packages -- and while Google didn't initially disclose pricing when it first announced the service, the company has now revealed that it will be available for free.

Software development has long depended on third-party libraries (which are often maintained by only a single developer), but it wasn't until the industry got hit with a number of high-profile exploits that everyone (including the White House) perked up and started taking software supply chain security seriously. Now, you can't attend an open source conference without hearing about Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), artifact registries and similar topics. It's no surprise then that Google, which has long been at the forefront of releasing open-source products, launched a service like Assured OSS.

Google promises that it will constantly keep these libraries up to date (without creating forks) and continuously scan for known vulnerabilities, do fuzz tests to discover new ones and then fix these issues and contribute these fixes back upstream. The company notes that when it first launched the service with around 250 Java libraries, it was responsible for discovering 48% of the new CVEs for these libraries and subsequently addressing them.

In the never-ending battle against online impersonation scams, the professional social media platform LinkedIn announced today a set of new verification features that enable users to authenticate aspects of their identities and job histories. From a report: Crucially, users will now have a few different options to verify their identity and current jobs on LinkedIn. That way, if someone tries to make a copycat LinkedIn account, there can be clear differences between the imposter account and the verified profile. LinkedIn facilitates verification in three ways that are all free to individual users. The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn. The social media platform has recently been piloting this work email verification feature with a small group of companies.

The second option is to verify your identity on LinkedIn through the airport security service Clear. The authentication company will take your United States phone number and government-issued ID and use the information to verify your name. You have to weigh whether you want to trust a third party like Clear with your personal data, but the option might be particularly appealing if you already use the company for travel verification and they have your data on file anyway. The third verification feature allows users to confirm their name and current employer through the Microsoft Entra Verified ID credential, a workplace identification platform Microsoft launched last year. This option will have a slower rollout, and it will be available at the end of the month to employees at a few dozen pilot companies that are already enrolled in Entra.

The company behind the Raspberry Pi line of computers has raised fresh investment from Sony's semiconductor unit, in a deal aimed at advancing its efforts in artificial intelligence. From a report: Sony Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, invested an undisclosed amount in Raspberry Pi Ltd, the trading company of Raspberry Pi, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. The extent of the funding was not revealed, but Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi's co-founder and CEO, said that the firm raised the cash at the same $500 million valuation it was worth in a 2021 funding round, when it brought in $45 million.

Upton established Raspberry Pi in 2012 with the aim of making computing more accessible to young people. Raspberry Pi's tiny single-board computers are the size of a credit card and have been used to build everything from high-altitude balloons to small radio-controlled submarines. Raspberry Pi's customers were mainly hobbyists and teachers in the early days. The company has since become a more active player in the enterprise -- in a typical year, roughly 70% of its sales now come from commercial customers embedding its products into factories or consumer devices, Upton told CNBC.

Ford said Tuesday it will spend $1.34 billion (C$1.8B) to turn its 70-year-old Oakville facility in Canada into an assembly plant for its next-generation of electric vehicles. TechCrunch reports: The campus, which first opened in 1953, will be renamed Oakville Electric Vehicle Complex. The company said Tuesday it will begin modernizing the 487-acre site in the second quarter of 2024. The upgrade includes completely retooling the facility that currently produces the internal combustion engine-powered Ford Edge and Lincoln Nautilus to own that only produces EVs. This is the first time that Ford has completely retooled an existing plant for EVs in North America.

Ford also plans to add a 407,000-square-foot battery plant that will use cells and arrays from its BlueOval SK Battery Park in Kentucky. Workers will assemble the components into battery packs and then install them into EVs produced at the plant. "I'm most excited for the world to see the incredible next-generation electric and fully digitally connected vehicles produced in Oakville," CEO Jim Farley said in a statement.

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users don't like it when Microsoft changes long-used and familiar functions in its OS, so altering something that's been the same for 28 years is always going to bring controversy. Nevertheless, it seems that the Redmond firm is planning on changing the Print Screen button into a key that opens the Windows 11 Snipping Tool. The Print Screen button has performed the same function in the Windows operating system since Windows 95: taking a screenshot of the current screen and copying it to the clipboard, usually so it can be edited in another program. But Windows Latest discovered that Microsoft is changing the default function of the Print Screen key in Windows 11. In the Windows 11 Beta preview builds 22621.1546 and 22624.1546, hitting the key will open the Windows Snipping Tool, Windows' built-in screenshotting tool that's currently accessed by pressing the Windows logo Key + Shift + S.

The French Competition Authority is likely to move forward soon with an antitrust investigation into Apple over complaints tied to 2021 changes to its app tracking policies, Axios reported, citing sources. From the report: A formal investigation would mark the first major government move taken globally against Apple related to privacy rule changes that upended the digital advertising world. French regulators are favoring issuing a formal "Statement of Objections" to parties involved in the matter in coming weeks, sources told Axios.

That step would signal to groups that issued initial complaints about Apple's actions and Apple that the authority found evidence of illegal anticompetitive behavior in its initial review of the complaints it received. The 2020 complaint argues that Apple's app tracking changes did not adequately adhere to European Union privacy rules and that Apple failed to hold itself to the same ad targeting standards that it forced on its competitors because it targeted iOS users with ads from app tracking data. The complaint was filed jointly by four French advertising trade groups -- IAB France, Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), SRI and UDECAM.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox has a reputation of being something of a resource hog, even among modern browsers. But it might not be entirely earned, because it looks like a CPU bug affecting Firefox users on Windows was actually the fault of Windows Defender. The latest update to the ubiquitous security tool addresses the issue, and should result in measurably lower CPU usage for the Windows version of Firefox. According to Mozilla senior software engineer Yannis Juglaret, the culprit was MsMpEng.exe, which you might recognize from your Task Manager. It handles the Real-Time protection feature that monitors web activity for malicious threats.

The bug was causing Firefox to call on the service much more frequently than comparable browsers like Chrome or Edge, resulting in notable CPU spikes. Said CPU spikes could reduce performance in other applications or affect a laptop's battery life. The issue was first reported on Mozilla's bug tracker system way back in 2018 and quickly assigned to the MsMpEng service, but some more recent and diligent documentation on the part of Juglaret resulted in more swift action from Microsoft's developers.

An anonymous reader shares a report:Weather apps are not all the same. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. On an average day, you're probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases -- which usually take place during severe weather events -- are what stick in a person's mind. "Eighty percent of the year, a weather app is going to work fine," Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston's Space City Weather, told me. "But it's that 20 percent where people get burned that's a problem."

No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. "My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast," Lanza told me. "That's how ingrained these services have become in most peoples' lives." The basic issue with weather apps, he argues, is that many of them remove a crucial component of a good, reliable forecast: a human interpreter who can relay caveats about models or offer a range of outcomes instead of a definitive forecast. [...] What people seem to be looking for in a weather app is something they can justify blindly trusting and letting into their lives -- after all, it's often the first thing you check when you roll over in bed in the morning. According to the 56,400 ratings of Carrot in Apple's App Store, its die-hard fans find the app entertaining and even endearing. "Love my psychotic, yet surprisingly accurate weather app," one five-star review reads. Although many people need reliable forecasting, true loyalty comes from a weather app that makes people feel good when they open it.

South Korea's antitrust regulator has fined Alphabet's Google 42.1 billion won ($31.88 million) for blocking the release of mobile video games on a competitor's platform. From a report: The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday that Google bolstered its market dominance, and hurt local app market One Store's revenue and value as a platform, by requiring video game makers to exclusively release their titles on Google Play in exchange for providing in-app exposure between June 2016 and April 2018.

Google said it will review the final decision by the KFTC to evaluate the next course of action. "Google makes substantial investments in the success of developers, and we respectfully disagree with the KFTC's conclusions", a spokesperson said. The KFTC said the move against the U.S. technology giant is part of efforts by the government to ensure fair markets.

The federal government is taking what could be the first steps toward requiring safer, more transparent AI systems as a Commerce Department agency invited public comment to help shape specific policy recommendations. From a report: The move is far short of the comprehensive AI legislation critics have advocated. But with the frenzy over generative AI continuing to grow, the Biden administration is trying to get a head start on a government response to the fast-moving industry. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is asking the public to weigh in on what role the federal government can play to ensure AI algorithms are acting as claimed and not causing harm.

"We really believe in the promise of AI," Assistant Commerce Secretary Alan Davidson, who runs NTIA, tells Axios. "We do believe it needs to be implanted safely and we're concerned that's not happening right now." Davidson said that the government could take a range of actions to shape AI that don't require new legislation -- including mandating audits as part of its procurement standards or offering prizes or bounties to those who find bias within algorithms. "We need to start the hard work of actually putting in place processes that are going to make people feel like the (AI) tools are doing what they say they are going to do, that models are behaving," Davidson said.

China plans to require a security review of generative AI services before they're allowed to operate, casting uncertainty over ChatGPT-like bots unveiled by the country's largest tech companies including Baidu. From a report: Providers of services must ensure content is accurate and respects intellectual property, and neither discriminates nor endangers security, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in draft guidelines published for public feedback. AI operators must also clearly label AI-generated content, the country's internet overseer said in a statement posted on its website.

The CAC's requirements add to Beijing's growing attempts to regulate the explosive growth of generative AI since OpenAI's ChatGPT fired up the industry in November. Companies from Alibaba Group to SenseTime and Baidu all aim to build the definitive next-generation AI platform for the world's largest internet market. That mirrors a growing wave of development abroad with Alphabet's Google and Microsoft among the many tech companies exploring generative AI, which can create original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts. China's made no secret of its wish to elevate AI at a time the country is locked in a conflict with the US over technology from chips to EVs. But it remains uncertain how the government intends to both galvanize and police the emergent field.