portfolio-cond – Page 57

Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

If you don’t follow the often-shady world of Bitcoin , you may not be familiar with Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST), a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam. BTCST shut down in August 2012, and on Wednesday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged its founder, Trendon Shavers, with running a Ponzi scheme. In a statement , the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700, 000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” The government’s financial regulator alleges that Shavers violated a number of federal financial regulations. In court documents , the SEC wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

Apple blames days-long Developer Center outage on “intruder”

Apple Since Thursday, registered Apple developers trying to download OS X 10.9, iOS 7, or any other Apple software from the company’s developer portal have been greeted with a notice that the site was down for “maintenance.” Today, the company issued a brief statement (above) blaming the extended outage on an “intruder, ” and that Apple “[has] not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed.” The notice says that “sensitive” information could not be accessed by the intruder because it was encrypted, and the company told MacWorld that the system in question is not used to store “customer information, ” application code, or data stored by applications. Anecdotal reports (including one from our own Jacqui Cheng ) point to a sudden spike in password reset requests for some Apple IDs, suggesting that email addresses have in fact been accessed and distributed but that passwords were not. In any case, we generally recommend that users change their passwords when any breach (or suspected breach) like this one occurs. “In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database, ” the statement said. Apple has also given week-long extensions to any developers’ whose program subscriptions were scheduled to lapse during the outage, which will keep those developers’ applications from being delisted in Apple’s various App Stores. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple blames days-long Developer Center outage on “intruder”

The cops are tracking my car—and yours

Aurich Lawson OAKLAND, CA—The last time the Oakland Police Department (OPD) saw me was on May 6, 2013 at 6:38:25pm. My car was at the corner of Mandana Blvd. and Grand Ave. , just blocks away from the apartment that my wife and I moved out of about a month earlier. It’s an intersection I drive through fairly frequently even now, and the OPD’s own license plate reader (LPR) data bears that out. One of its LPRs—Unit 1825—captured my car passing through that intersection twice between late April 2013 and early May 2013. I have no criminal record, have committed no crime, and am not (as far as I know) under investigation by the OPD or any law enforcement agency. Since I first moved to Oakland in 2005, I’ve been pulled over by the OPD exactly once—for accidentally not making a complete stop while making a right-hand turn at a red light—four years ago. Nevertheless, the OPD’s LPR system captured my car 13 times between April 29, 2012 and May 6, 2013 at various points around the city, and it retained that data. My car is neither wanted nor stolen. The OPD has no warrant on me, no probable cause, and no reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, yet it watches where I go. Is that a problem? Read 73 remaining paragraphs | Comments

UK gov’t approves autonomous cars on public roads before year’s end

The British government has announced that it will approve testing of driverless cars on public roads in the United Kingdom before the end of 2013. According to a new 80-page report published on Tuesday entitled “Action for Roads: A network for the 21st century, ” a team at Oxford University and Nissan have already begun work but have only been testing in private areas. The plan comes less than a year after Florida , California , and Nevada have approved similar testing. Michigan is not far behind, either. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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UK gov’t approves autonomous cars on public roads before year’s end

ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

American Chris Cassidy and Italian Luca Parmitano were forced to call off this morning’s planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station when Parmitano suddenly reported that there was water inside of his suit helmet. “My head is really wet and I have a feeling it’s increasing, ” he radioed about an hour into the spacewalk. Video of the aborted EVA, starting with the discovery of the water. The call to terminate EVA comes at 12:45. Station airlock opens at 44:48. The EVA, designated EVA-23, was one of the ones that Ars watched astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano train for late last year. That was during our visit to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory , the giant swimming pool where NASA simulates spacewalks in microgravity. According to NASASpaceFlight’s recounting of events , Parmitano was in the process of running data cabling to connect the as-yet-unlaunched Russian Nauka module when the water began to make itself apparent. The quantity of liquid in Parmitano’s helmet rapidly increased, with Parmitano noting that it had begun to enter his eyes, nose, and mouth. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

$99 ARM-based PC runs either Ubuntu or Android

A new ARM-based Linux PC with a host of capabilities—including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and five USB ports—goes on sale next month starting at $99. ” Utilite , ” offered by Israeli company CompuLab, won’t be as cheap as a Raspberry Pi , but the specs justify the cost. With dimensions of 5.3” × 3.9” × 0.8”, Utilite comes with a Freescale i.MX6 system-on-chip with a single-, dual-, or quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor (which uses 3-8 watts of power). It will have up to 4GB of DDR3 1066MHz memory, up to 512GB of SSD storage, and a microSD slot allowing another 128GB. The PC can be purchased with either Ubuntu Linux or Android. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

PCs that use Thunderbolt are rare, and they’re getting rarer. Chris Foresman For Thunderbolt fans hoping that the high-speed interface will catch on, we’ve got more bad news: an Acer representative talking to CNET has said that the company has no plans to support Thunderbolt in its PCs this year. Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook was one of the few Windows laptops to include Thunderbolt support when it was introduced in early 2012. “We’re really focusing on USB 3.0—it’s an excellent alternative to Thunderbolt, ” said the Acer spokesperson. “It’s less expensive, offers comparable bandwidth, charging for devices such as mobile phones, and has a large installed base of accessories and peripherals.” By itself, the news of one company distancing itself from Thunderbolt might not be a big deal, but this is just another example of the trouble that Thunderbolt faces two-and-a-half years after its public introduction in the 2011 MacBook Pro. A Newegg search reveals a handful of high-end desktop motherboards that support it (five boards, all above $150), but the complete list of non-Apple prebuilt systems that have ever supported the interface is pretty short . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

Ken May

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