Locke2005 shares a report from CNBC: Hackers stole several hundred million dollars’ worth of a lesser-known cryptocurrency from a major Japanese exchange Friday. Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange’s NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translate of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare. The stolen NEM coins were worth about 58 billion yen at the time of detection, or roughly $534.8 million, according to the exchange. Coincheck subsequently restricted withdrawals of all currencies, including yen, and trading of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin. Locke2005 adds, “That, my friends, is the prime reason why speculating in cryptocurrency is a bad idea!” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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$500 Million Worth of Cryptocurrency Stolen From Japanese Exchange
An anonymous reader shares a report via email: As of the start of the year, 19 U.S. states had raised minimum wages, dramatizing a long simmering debate: Do minimum wages kill jobs, and make the working class worse off in the end? Or do they simply make them a little richer, with little or no loss to overall employment? In a new paper, economists Grace Lordan of the London School of Economics and David Neumark of UC Irvine parse 35 years of census data and come down on the worse-off side: For lower-skill jobs like bookkeepers and assembly-line workers, they say, higher minimum wages encourage employers to automate — according to their calculations, a $1 increase can cost tens of thousands of jobs nationally. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: In more than 90 cities across the US, including New York, microphones placed strategically around high-crime areas pick up the sounds of gunfire and alert police to the shooting’s location via dots on a city map… ShotSpotter also sends alerts to apps on cops’ phones. “We’ve gone to the dot and found the casings 11 feet from where the dot was, according to the GPS coordinates, ” Capt. David Salazar of the Milwaukee Police Dept. told Business Insider. “So it’s incredibly helpful. We’ve saved a lot of people’s lives.” When three microphones pick up a gunshot, ShotSpotter figures out where the sound comes from. Human analysts in the Newark, California, headquarters confirm the noise came from a gun (not a firecracker or some other source). The police can then locate the gunshot on a map and investigate the scene. The whole process happens “much faster” than dialing 911, Salazar said, though he wouldn’t disclose the exact time. The company’s CEO argues their technology deters crime by demonstrating to bad neighborhoods that police will respond quickly to gunshots. (Although last year Forbes discovered that in 30% to 70% of cases, “police found no evidence of a gunshot when they arrived.”) And in a neighborhood where ShotSpotter is installed, one 60-year-old man is already complaining, “I don’t like Big Brother being in all my business.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup: Wells Fargo may have opened as many as 3.5 million bogus bank accounts without its customers’ permission, attorneys for customers suing the bank have alleged in a court filing, suggesting the bank may have created far more fake accounts than previously indicated. The plaintiffs’ new estimate of bogus bank accounts is about 1.4 million, or 67%, higher than the original estimate — disclosed last year as part of a settlement with regulators — that up to 2.1 million accounts were opened without customers’ permission… The attorneys covered a period from 2002 to 2017, rather than the previously scrutinized five-year stretch from 2011 to some time in 2016 in which the bank acknowledged setting up unauthorized accounts. Wells Fargo terminated 5, 300 employees for creating fake accounts, and their CEO now acknowledges that “we had an incentive program and a high-pressure sales culture within our community bank that drove behavior that many times was inappropriate and inconsistent with our values.” In a possibly-related story, Wells Fargo plans to shut 450 branches over the next two years. Read more of this story at Slashdot.