The Browser Company's Chromium-based Arc browser "isn't perfect, and it takes some getting used to," writes the Verge. "But it's full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web — and it's right about most of them." Arc wants to be the web's operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen. Another way to think about it is that Arc treats the web the way TikTok treats video: not as a fixed thing for you to consume but as a set of endlessly remixable components for you to pull apart, play with, and use to create something of your own. Want something to look better or have an idea for what to do with it? Go for it.

This is a fun moment in the web browser industry. After more than a decade of total Chrome dominance, users are looking elsewhere for more features, more privacy, and better UI. Vivaldi has some really clever features; SigmaOS is also betting on browsers as operating systems; Brave has smart ideas about privacy; even Edge and Firefox are getting better fast. But Arc is the biggest swing of them all: an attempt to not just improve the browser but reinvent it entirely....

Right now, Arc is only available for the Mac, but the company has said it's also working on Windows and mobile versions, both due next year. It's still in a waitlisted beta and is still very much a beta app, with some basic features missing, other features still in flux, and a few deeply annoying bugs. But Arc's big ideas are the right ones. I don't know if The Browser Company is poised to take on giants and win the next generation of the browser wars, but I'd bet that the future of browsers looks a lot like Arc....

In a way, Arc is more like ChromeOS than Chrome. It tries to expand the browser to become the only app you need because, in a world where all your apps are web apps and all your files are URLs, who really needs more than a browser?
The article describes Arc as a power user tool with vertical sidebar combining bookmarks, tabs, and apps. (And sets of these can apparently be combined into different "spaces".) These are enhanced with a hefty set of keyboard shortcuts (including tab searching), along with built-in media controls for Twitch/Spotify/Google Meet (as well as a picture-in-picture mode).
BR. Arc even has a shareable, collaborative whiteboard app "Easel". And it also offers powerful features like the ability to rewrite how your browser displays any site's CSS. ("I have one that removes the Trending sidebar from Twitter and another that cleans up my Gmail page.")

According to documents recently declassified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), former President Donald Trump posted a classified satellite image of a failed rocket launch in Iran on Twitter in 2019. NPR reports: Now, three years after Trump's tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image. The declassification, which came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, followed a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public. Many details on the original image remain redacted -- a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the U.S. government's most prized intelligence on social media, says Steven Aftergood, specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists. "He was getting literally a bird's eye view of some of the most sensitive US intelligence on Iran," he says. "And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter." "[A]erospace experts determined the photo was taken by a classified spacecraft called USA 224, believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance aircraft," adds Gizmodo. "The spacecraft is similar to the Hubble Telescope, but instead of getting a closer look at the stars, it views the Earth's surface."

Frederick Brooks, the famed computer architect who discovered the software tar pit and designed OS/360, died Thursday. He also debunked the concept of the Mythical Man-Month in his book, writing: "Adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer."

A true icon, who won the Turing Award in 2000, Brooks was one of the great thinkers in computing. Industry tributes are pouring in the celebration of his contribution and life.

Further reading: His interview with Grady Booch for Computer History Museum [PDF].

The iPhone 15 Pro models are in line for a massive upgrade to their wired transfer speeds with the switch to USB-C, according to noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Unfortunately, he doesn't believe that benefit is coming to the regular 2023 iPhones. The Verge reports: He predicts that the 15 and 15 Plus will also swap in USB-C ports but, just like the 2022 10th-gen iPad, they'll be stuck with the same USB 2.0 speeds they had with Lighting. Kuo made the prediction in a series of tweets on Wednesday and says the information is from his "latest survey." (The analyst is known for getting information from supply chain sources.) He specified by predicting that the "15 Pro & 15 Pro Max will support at least USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3." If that's true, that'd mean they could transfer data at speeds up to 40 Gbps -- a boon for people who actually use the Pro phones to shoot a lot of ProRes video and raw photos, where even fast WiFi and cloud uploads aren't really a good substitute.

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, announced late Wednesday that his government plans to buy one Bitcoin every day starting on Thursday. Gizmodo reports: The current price of one Bitcoin is roughly $16,540, down 1.5% from a day earlier and down 73% from a year ago. Bitcoin was trading at an all-time high of over $68,000 in November 2021 when El Salvador was purchasing large quantities of Bitcoin. President Bukele has already lost El Salvador tens of millions of dollars, according to the latest calculations by Bloomberg News. El Salvador hasn't publicly confirmed how many bitcoin purchases the country has made, but based on Bukele's tweets we can determine he's purchased 2,381 Bitcoin since the start of his experiment. The price for all the country's Bitcoin holdings has totaled $105 million to purchase, according to Bloomberg, while the current worth is roughly $39.4 million. Bukele would've been smarter just holding U.S. dollars as cash, even with annual inflation at almost 8%.

Despite declaring Bitcoin an official currency in El Salvador in late 2021, few people are actually using the crypto for purchases in the country. And one of the common reasons cited for declaring it a currency, sending remittances back to the country from abroad, has been a bust as well. Roughly $6.4 billion dollars was sent as remittances to El Salvador from September 2021 until June 2022, but less than 2% of those were in cryptocurrency, according to Reuters. The Bitcoin experiment has also caused El Salvador's credit rating to get knocked down repeatedly, with the country's rating currently sitting at CC, due to the likelihood it will default on bond obligations that are coming due in 2023, according to CoinDesk.

NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California.

This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. NASA posted a video of the liftoff on their Twitter. Additional updates are available @NASA_SLS.

The UK Treasury has opened an account on Discord to a torrent of abuse from users of the gamer-focused chat app -- abuse they managed to send despite the government blocking all comments on the service. The Guardian reports: With its community-focused approach, where servers encourage tight-knit groups to form and discuss issues related to the overall focus of the topic, Discord may seem an odd fit for the strait-laced world of government communications. But the app has a lot of users interested in finance, thanks to solid take-up among day traders and crypto fans, two groups the Treasury is eager to connect with. The result: a read-only Discord server, where the only user who is allowed to post is the snappily named HMTreasurySocialAdmin1, who shares tweet-length news about the Treasury and chancellor.

But trolls will always find a way. Although posting is banned, emoji reactions are enabled, letting any user respond to a post from the Treasury with a single emoji, and new users are cheerily announced in a "welcome" channel. That means the Treasury's server has been eagerly posting automated messages such as, "Welcome, LOCK UP PRINCE ANDREW. We hope you brought pizza," and "Welcome Jeremy Corbyn. Say hi!". The latter does not appear to be the real account of the former leader of the opposition. [...] UPDATE: Emoji reactions and the welcome channel vanished but eventually returned. According to the HM Treasure admin, Discord is the reason to blame for the issues.

"Due to the rapid growth of today's channel which has seen over 7,000 members join, a technical difficulty has led to reactions being paused," a post in the news channel read. "We are working with Discord to get reactions turned back on." The trolling can be continued here.

"The collapse of FTX will likely give rise to a number of criminal and civil actions against the exchange and its executives, like former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried," reports CoinDesk, citing a number of legal experts. "It's also likely to push forward actual regulatory changes, either via lawmakers or through federal agencies themselves." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: FTX filed for bankruptcy last Friday, days after halting withdrawals and a little over a week after CoinDesk first reported that the balance sheet of FTX sister company Alameda Research held a surprisingly large amount of FTT, an exchange token issued by FTX. FTX was "fine," Bankman-Fried said in response to questions about his exchange's solvency, before a series of events showed otherwise. As a result, several state and federal agencies launched or expanded investigations into the company, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas and the Bahamas' Financial Crimes Investigation Branch. Members of the U.S. Congress from both political parties are also calling for further action as a result of the collapse. Some lawmakers are even talking about holding hearings, potentially by the end of the year, said Ron Hammond of the Blockchain Association.

The fact that regulators apparently had no view into some of the major projects that fell apart this year -- such as Celsius, Three Arrows, Luna and now FTX -- is "precisely the problem," said an industry participant who works closely with policymakers. Still, the individual told CoinDesk that they don't expect any major legislative action to occur this year. Most likely, Congress will look at bills like the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, a bill that Bankman-Fried supported but was written prior to that, in the upcoming year. According to an attorney who requested anonymity, the SEC may have an easier time kicking off the investigation just due to its mandate. "The SEC is in a much better position to go to court and get a freeze [on assets] if they believe there's a reason to do that," the attorney said. "The SEC also has a less cumbersome process for subpoenaing testimony and freezing documents." The SEC and DOJ are likely to cooperate though, to the extent that DOJ investigators may sit in on SEC interviews.

FTX has various U.S. connections, which is all the SEC and DOJ need to assert jurisdiction for their investigations. FTX appears to be preparing for these investigations, with FTX US General Counsel Ryne Miller having already told the entire company to preserve documents. A former federal prosecutor told CoinDesk that the bankruptcy court may also shed light on the situation, thus assisting government investigators with their probes. "The bankruptcy court has the ability to now oversee the company and to obtain information from the company that, let's say the DOJ might not have been able to obtain as easily pre-bankruptcy, and they'll likely have access to a new trustee or an examiner and be able to learn in essentially real-time what's going on," the former prosecutor said. Executives like Bankman-Fried may also "be in a tough spot with respect to" deciding whether to cooperate or assert Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, the former prosecutor added. "A complicating factor -- for FTX anyway -- may be the fact that Bankman-Fried has tweeted his way through his company's collapse," adds CoinDesk.

"It's a complete nightmare," said Ken White, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at the Brown White & Osborn law firm. "This is a situation where all sorts of agencies are going to be looking at this, the SEC, the FTC, and probably the Department of Justice. There are all sorts of potential criminal and civil consequences -- lawsuits. Civil lawsuits are a certainty. And here he is sort of tweeting out his thoughts about it. It's every attorney's nightmare of what a client might do."

The main issue being that Bankman-Fried repeatedly took to Twitter to reassure users that everything was fine. "It creates new bases for criminal or civil claims against him just based on those tweets," White said. "So if he says that everything's fine, that their assets are real assets, and that's not true, then that can be securities fraud, and wire fraud, all sorts of other stuff, not to mention all sorts of civil causes of action ... It is just disastrously reckless."

About three weeks ago Crypto.com "mistakenly sent 320,000 in Ethereum (~$416 million USD) to another cryptocurrency exchange, called Gate.io," reports the Verge's storystream (citing a report from Web3 Is Going Just Great). In a post on Twitter, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company was supposed to send the crypto to one of its cold, or offline, wallets, but accidentally sent it to a "whitelisted" address belonging to its corporate account at Gate.io.

This all unfolded after Marszalek publicly posted the company's cold wallet addresses to provide transparency about what the exchange does with its funds. After digging into Crypto.com's transactions, one user, Conor Grogan, points out that the exchange sent 320,000 in Ethereum to Gate.io on October 21st, an amount that makes up about 80 percent of the company's Ethereum holdings.

Marszalek later added that it was able to recover "the entirety" of the transferred assets. Users on Twitter confirmed that Crypto.com received its funds back about a week later.... Gate.io also issued a response, noting that it started returning the funds once it realized the transfer was "an operation error." But hey, at least Crypto.com's funds were actually returned this time. In August, a pretty unfortunate typo resulted in Crypto.com giving a customer $7.2 million instead of a $68 refund, which it's currently suing to get back.

Despite the reassurances from Marszalek that "all our systems are operating normally," this whole ordeal is sparking withdrawals from the platform as users begin to worry whether Crypto.com will suffer the same fate as the now-bankrupt FTX and other beleaguered firms.

Last week Australia's bigest health insurer, Medibank, said that data on all 4 million of its customers was breached. Now the group behind that breach "have since released more sensitive details of customers' medical records on the dark web, including data on abortions and alcohol issues," reports Australia's public broadcaster.

Their article points out that the release "follows Medibank's refusal to pay a ransom for the data, with almost 500,000 health claims stolen, along with personal information." But what's really interesting is that article's headine:

" 'Hunt down the scumbags': Australian government to 'hack the hackers' behind Medibank breach" The Australian government is going to "hunt down the scumbags" responsible for the Medibank hack that compromised the private information of nearly 10 million customers, cyber security minister Clare O'Neil said.... "Around 100 officers around these two organisations will be a part of this joint standing operation, and many of these officers will be physically co-located from the Australian Signals Directorate," she said. Ms. O'Neil said the officers will "show up to work every day" with the "goal of bringing down these gangs and thugs".

"This is the formalisation of a partnership — a standing body within the Australian government which will day in, day out, hunt down the scumbags who are responsible for these malicious crimes against innocent people," she said. "The smartest and toughest people in our country are going to hack the hackers...."

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw on Friday said officers were also working with Interpol to track down the criminals. "We know who you are," he said. "The AFP has some significant runs on the scoreboard when it comes to bringing overseas offenders back to Australia to face the justice system."
One Australian think tank told the Associated Press that the breach was caused by a stolen username and password, sold on a Russian dark web forum. "In a tweet, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose own Medibank data was stolen, said the Australian Federal Police knows where the hackers are and are working to bring them to justice," reports TechCrunch: The cybercriminals claimed that they initially sought $10 million in ransom from Medibank before reducing the sum to $9.7 million, or $1 per affected customer, the blog said. "Unfortunately, we expect the criminal to continue to release stolen customer data each day," Medibank CEO David Koczkar said on Friday. "These are real people behind this data and the misuse of their data is deplorable and may discourage them from seeking medical care."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: The swift collapse of the FTX crypto exchange has sparked an industry push among big rivals to publish proof of their reserves as a means to provide transparency into the assets on their platforms. With those efforts just getting underway, one firm, Crypto.com, has taken the proactive step of providing a preliminary set of disclosures -- sharing wallet addresses with the blockchain analysis firm Nansen to create a dashboard of nearly $3 billion of reserves and other assets. What that shows is just how heavily the mix of assets is skewed toward a meme-y token called shiba inu (SHIB), a digital asset built atop the Ethereum blockchain that was largely inspired by the joke token dogecoin (DOGE).

Like DOGE -- a key staple of billionaire Elon Musk's crypto schtick on Twitter -- the SHIB token is a highly volatile cryptocurrency whose primary use case is often considered to be speculation itself; it's traded for fast profits and yuks. Of the $2.88 billion in total assets in the wallets, roughly $558 million, or about 20%, are in SHIB. The holding ranks second only to the $872 million of bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market value, which represents 31%. The amount exceeds the $487 million in ether (ETH), the second-biggest cryptocurrency, and dwarfs the $1.5 million in dogecoin (DOGE), Nansen data suggests. Crypto.com's large holding of SHIB is a "reflection of user interest/activity," Nansen data journalist Martin Lee told CoinDesk.

"In an ideal world, we'd want the best assets to be worth the most, but SHIB and DOGE both have extremely high market caps," he said. So it's "not super surprising that retail-heavy exchanges will have a higher concentration of such tokens. And regardless, as an exchange, your main source of revenue would likely be trading fees, so whether it's meme coins or more fundamentally sound assets, your business model is intact."

Further reading: Binance's CZ Slams Reports Binance's Reserves Are Full of Its Own Tokens

More than $380 million in crypto left bankrupt crypto company FTX's wallets late Friday, with little clear explanation as to why. CoinDesk: According to on-chain data, various Ethereum tokens, as well as Solana and Binance Smart Chain tokens have exited FTX's official wallets and moved to decentralized exchanges like 1inch. Both FTX and FTX US appear to be affected. FTX US general counsel Ryne Miller tweeted that he was "investigating abnormalities with wallet movements related to consolidation of ftx balances across exchanges."

The transfers, which have not been addressed officially by FTX leadership, come on the same day that the firm officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after apparently losing billions of dollars in user funds. Many FTX wallet holders are also reporting that they are seeing $0 balances in their FTX.com and FTX US wallets. There are indications that FTX may have been hacked.

At least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from collapsed crypto exchange FTX, Reuters reported separately. From the report: The exchange's founder Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Bankman-Fried's trading company Alameda Research, the people told Reuters. A large portion of that total has since disappeared, they said. One source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion. The other said the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion.

Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency exchange FTX has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S., according to a company statement posted on Twitter. From a report: Bankman-Fried has also stepped down as CEO and has been replaced by John J. Ray III, though the outgoing chief will stay on to assist with the transition. Approximately 130 additional affiliated companies are part of the proceedings, including Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's crypto trading firm, and FTX.us, the company's U.S. subsidiary.

In the 23-page bankruptcy filing obtained by CNBC, FTX indicates that it has more than 100,000 creditors, assets in the range of $10 billion to $50 billion, as well as liabilities in the range of $10 billion to $50 billion. Bankman-Fried also indicated that he wishes to appoint Stephen Neal as the firm's new chairman of the board. "The immediate relief of Chapter 11 is appropriate to provide the FTX Group the opportunity to assess its situation and develop a process to maximize recoveries for stakeholders," said the new FTX chief, Ray. "The FTX Group has valuable assets that can only be effectively administered in an organized, joint process. I want to ensure every employee, customer, creditor, contract party, stockholder, investor, governmental authority and other stakeholder that we are going to conduct this effort with diligence, thoroughness and transparency," continued Ray.

Crypto Lender BlockFi said it could not conduct business as normal and would be limiting activity in the wake of FTX's collapse. CoinDesk reports: The company said in a tweet that the "lack of clarity" around FTX's current situation meant it would pause client withdrawals. It also told clients not to deposit to its wallet or interest accounts. Developing...

Bahamian regulators have frozen the assets of FTX Digital Markets and related parties, calling it a "prudent course of action" to "preserve assets and stabilize the company," according to a press release on Thursday. CoinDesk reports: The Securities Commission of the Bahamas also suspended FTX's registration and appointed an attorney -- Brian Sims, a senior partner at Lennox Paton -- as a provisional liquidator of the assets. FTX is based in the Bahamas and is a separate entity from FTX US.

"The commission is aware of public statements suggesting that clients' assets were mishandled, mismanaged and/or transferred to Alameda Research. Based on the commission's information, any such actions would have been contrary to normal governance, without client consent and potentially unlawful," the commission said in its release. For a recap of events surrounding FTX, check out the related links below.

Studio Ghibli, the beloved animation producer behind worldwide hits like Spirited Away, Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies, is teaming up with Lucasfilm, home to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, for a mysterious new project. Polygon reports: On Thursday, the Japanese studio tweeted a cryptic video teaser, with the Lucasfilm and Studio Ghibli logos back to back and... maddeningly nothing else. The video is silent, so there are no John Williams-penned themes to work from here. But suffice it to say, the teaser is most likely for an animated project based on a Lucasfilm property, and Star Wars seems like a safe bet. Lucasfilm and Disney have multiple animated Star Wars series, including the recently released Tales of the Jedi and -- the most likely candidate for Studio Ghibli -- Star Wars: Visions.

A second season of Star Wars: Visions is coming to Disney Plus in spring 2023. And while Disney and Lucasfilm have not revealed much about who is contributing to it, Star Wars: Visions Volume 2 is pitched as a "global tour, celebrating the incredible animation happening across countries and cultures."

Solana's SOL is down much further than any of the other major cryptocurrencies today, all of which are down badly following the sudden unraveling of the wildly fast growing crypto exchange FTX on Tuesday. Axios reports: Blockchain principles aim to instantiate the ideals of decentralization. That is, no single points of failure. Blockchain realities, though, show that each community tends to have its major leaders. For Solana, one of those was definitely FTX's c0-founder, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). SBF has long been bullish on Solana, including working to build Serum, an order book style exchange that runs in a decentralized fashion. His firms are rumored to have owned a substantial amount of the total SOL supply.

FTX and Alameda Trading are in trouble. If they hold large amounts of SOL, they are very likely to exit those positions, which will tank SOL price. CoinDesk reported on Nov. 2 that Alameda had $292 million in SOL and $863 million in locked SOL (on the Solana blockchain, large holders can earn more by backing the blockchain's validators by committing not to sell -- or locking -- for a certain period of time). "People are dumping already -- self-fulfilling prophecy," Economics Design's Lisa Jy Tan told Axios over Twitter DM. Tomorrow, the entities verifying the Solana blockchain have already publicly indicated their intention to unlock about a billion dollars worth of SOL (at current prices), about 17% of its market cap. It's reasonable to expect they might intend to sell.

Solana's fall has put stress on one of its leading decentralized finance applications, Solend, a money market that works much like Ethereum's Compound. Solend is gradually unwinding a single, almost $30 million USDC (stablecoin) loan, collateralized by SOL, which is falling fast while the protocol tries to sell. Much like SOL's price, the total value locked (TVL) in various DeFi projects on Solana has fallen much further in the last day than on other smart contract blockchains, according to DefiLlama. Solana TVL is down 45% over the last day, to $470 million, as of Wednesday afternoon, New York time.

Following the collapse of popular crypto exchange FTX, Bitcoin fell 12% to just under $16,000, hitting a low not seen since November 2020. "It reached its all-time high of $68,982.20 one year ago Thursday," notes CNBC. From the report: Cryptocurrencies extended their slide for a second day Wednesday as the market absorbed the potential collapse of popular crypto exchange FTX. Prices were pressured to start the day and plunged by late afternoon as Binance, the largest global exchange by volume, abandoned plans to acquire Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX after a due diligence exam and recent reports of mishandled customer funds and alleged U.S. agency investigations of FTX.

The Bankman-Fried empire quickly unraveled after a report last week showed a large part of the balance sheet at Alameda Research, the trading company where Bankman-Fried was also CEO, had been concentrated in FTX Token (FTT), the native token of the FTX trading platform. After some light sparring on Twitter with Bankman-Fried, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced his company was offloading the FTT on its books, leading to a run on the popular FTX exchange and a liquidity crisis. FTX counts some of the biggest names in finance -- including SoftBank, BlackRock, Tiger Global, Thoma Bravo, Sequoia and Paradigm -- among its investors. "Given the public-facing nature of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and the size of FTX, we believe that the week's events could cause some loss of consumer confidence in the crypto industry, beyond that seen in the aftermath of the 3AC, Celsius, and Voyager events that took place earlier this year," especially if panic spreads and crypto prices keep dropping, KBW analysts said in a note Tuesday. "It may take time for customers to regain trust in the industry, broadly speaking (and we think regulation could help this)."

The Bloomberg Terminal has updated its estimate of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried's net worth on Nov. 8 to $991 million, down from $16 billion the day before. CryptoSlate reports: The reduced estimate that takes away SBF's billionaire status comes as the native token of the FTX exchange, FTT, fell over 83% to a low of just $2.67 from a daily high of $20.47. A large percentage of SBF's wealth is tied to his business activities with both FTX and Alameda Research, meaning a reduction in the price of FTT tokens would directly affect his personal wealth.

The crypto community on Twitter, never to shy away from adding comedy to tragedy, shared memes and anecdotes comparing SBF to Mark Zuckerberg and the fictional Russ Hannemann from the TV show Silicon Valley. Hannemann had a similar experience losing his "3 commas" status, becoming "just" a multimillionaire. In addition, many users commented that SBF's fall from grace outweighs most retail investors' 2022 losses.

Microsoft is now promoting some of its products in the sign-out flyout menu that shows up when clicking the user icon in the Windows 11 start menu. BleepingComputer: This new Windows 11 "feature" was discovered by Windows enthusiast Albacore, who shared several screenshots of advertisement notifications in the Accounts flyout. The screenshots show that Microsoft promotes the OneDrive file hosting service and prods users to create or complete their Microsoft accounts.

Those reacting to this on social media had an adverse reaction to Redmond's decision to display promotional messages in the start menu. Some said that Windows 11 is "getting worse in each and every update it gets," while others added that this is a weird choice given that "half of the Start Menu is for recommendations" anyway. BleepingComputer has also tried replicating this on multiple Windows 11 systems, but we didn't get any ads. This hints at an A/B testing experiment trying to gauge the success of such a "feature" on devices running Windows Insider builds or the company pushing such ads to a limited set of customers.