Things are not looking good for LinkedIn right now. Just two months after a jaw-dropping 500 million profiles from the networking site were put up for sale on a popular hacker forum, a new posting with 700 million LinkedIn records has appeared.
The seller, “GOD User” TomLiner, stated they were in possession of the 700 million records on June 22 2021, and included a sample of 1 million records on RaidForums to prove their claims. Our researchers have viewed the sample and can confirm that the damning records include information such as full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers, and industry information.
We reached out to LinkedIn for verification and received this official statement from Leonna Spilman:
“While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”
[…]
Is the data the same as from the previous LinkedIn leak?
According to a statement from LinkedIn, the previous data leak contained an “aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies” as well “publicly viewable member profile data.” However, it was not technically a breach since no private information was stolen.
This time around, it seems as though the records are, once again, a cumulation of data from previous leaks. However, this could still include information from both public and private profiles. We employ a strict policy of not supporting sellers of stolen data and, therefore, have not purchased the leaked list to verify all of the records.
Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.
Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.
“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.
[…]
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called for an end to the overuse of secret gag orders, arguing in a Washington Post opinion piece that “prosecutors too often are exploiting technology to abuse our fundamental freedoms.” Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, has said the Justice Department will abandon its practice of seizing reporter records and will formalize that stance soon.
[…]
Burt said that while the revelation that federal prosecutors had sought data about journalists and political figures was shocking to many Americans, the scope of surveillance is much broader. He criticized prosecutors for reflexively seeking secrecy through boilerplate requests that “enable law enforcement to just simply assert a conclusion that a secrecy order is necessary.”
[…]
As possible solutions, Burt said, the government should end indefinite secrecy orders and should also be required to notify the target of the data demand once the secrecy order has expired.
Just this week, he said, prosecutors sought a blanket gag order affecting the government of a major U.S. city for a Microsoft data request targeting a single employee there.
“Without reform, abuses will continue to occur and they will occur in the dark,” Burt said.
Virgin Orbit had a successful first commercial launch, meaning there’s now officially another small satellite launch provider in operation with a track record of delivering payloads to space. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket took off from its carrier aircraft at around 11:45 AM EDT today, and the spacecraft had a successful series of engine fires and stage separations to make the trip to low Earth orbit.
On board, Virgin Orbit carried seven payloads, including the first-ever defense satellite for the Netherlands, as well as cubsats developed by the U.S. Department of Defense for its Rapid Agile Launch initiative. The initiative is seeking to test the viability of flying small spacecraft to space on relatively short notice on launch platforms with increased flexibility, which Virgin Orbit’s provides thanks to its ability to take off horizontally from more or less conventional runways.
Virgin Orbit also carried two Earth observation satellites for Polish startup SatRevolution, and it will be delivering more in future flights to help build out that company’s planned 14-spacecraft constellation.
As expected, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal in cassation by Dutch FilmWorks.The highest judicial body follows the motivation of the Prosecutor General, who previously issued advice on this.DFW announced in 2015 that it would take enforcement action against people who illegally download films.The matter was widely publicized.DFW wanted to address individual users and possibly even fine them.It engaged an outside company to collect the IP addresses.The distributor also received permission for this data collection.However, in order to address these users, DFW had to have their name and address details, which are only known to internet providers.Ziggo refused to provide that information.Dutch Filmworks was rejected by the court and the Supreme Court also sees no reason to annul the earlier judgment.
The Royal Netherlands Navy has now confirmed that its De Zeven Provincien class frigate HNLMS Evertsen, which has been sailing in the Black Sea together with the U.K. Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender, was harassed by Russian fighter jets last week. The announcement comes after Russia and the United Kingdom entered something of a war of words last week when the Type 45 destroyer HMS Defenderconducted maneuvers in an area close to Russian-controlled Crimea. Both of these ships are currently part of the British aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth’smultinational strike group, also known as Carrier Strike Group 21, or CSG21.
The Royal Netherlands Navy today released a statement highlighting the events that occurred last Thursday, June 24. That was the day after Russia claimed to have dropped bombs and fired warning shots to ward off HMS Defender, which Moscow claimed had violated the Russian maritime border around the Crimean Peninsula. The Kremlin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, an annexation that neither the Netherlands nor the United Kingdom recognizes as legal.
Royal Netherlands Navy
A pair of Russian Navy Su-30SMs fly over the Evertsen.
According to the Royal Netherlands Navy’s account, HNLMS Evertsen was “southeast of Crimea” on June 24 when Russian fighter jets “created unsafe situations” in the Black Sea. No further details are provided of the warship’s location at this point, although it seems, at least, the Dutch vessel did not follow the same course as HMS Defender.
A series of photos released by the Royal Netherlands Navy today shows a pair of Su-30SM multirole fighter-bombers, likely from the Russian Navy, flying low over the warship, with at least one of the aircraft armed with a pair of Kh-31 (AS-17 Krypton) supersonic anti-ship missiles under the engine nacelles.
Vitaly V. Kuzmin/Wikimedia Commons
A Kh-31 missile.
In what the Dutch Ministry of Defense describes as “repeated harassment,” between around 3:30 PM and 8:30 PM that day, the Su-30SMs flew “dangerously low and close by, performing feint attacks.” Su-30SMs were also involved in last week’s incident with HMS Defender, with at least one example seen shadowing the warship in an official Russian Ministry of Defense video. These Russian Navy jets are assigned to the 43rd Independent Naval Assault Aviation Regiment based at Saki in Crimea.
Royal Netherlands Navy
A Su-30SM armed with Kh-31 missiles passes alongside the Evertsen.
The Dutch account describes the Russian aircraft being armed with bombs (not immediately visible) and air-to-surface missiles. The jets also used their onboard electronic warfare systems to disrupt electronic equipment onboard the Evertsen, according to the Dutch. The Su-30SM is equipped with an internal Khibiny-U electronic warfare suite that includes powerful jammers to blind and confuse adversary radars.
one of the world’s largest private tactical jet air forces, is now set to add F-16A/B fighters to its roster after the Dutch government announced it had agreed to transfer 12 of the jets to the North American company. Draken will join fellow private contractor Top Aces in operating F-16s for “red air” adversary support, which is now in great demand, especially to fulfill the U.S. Air Force’s mammoth adversary air contract.
In a letter published today, the Dutch Secretary of State for Defense, Barbara Visser, confirmed that an agreement had been reached for the sale of a dozen ex-Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF) F-16A/Bs plus associated unspecified items.
U.S. Air Force/Sgt. Richard Andrade
A Royal Netherlands Air Force F-16AM taxies down the flight line at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan.
“Draken International has been contracted by the U.S. government for years to take on the role of the enemy in U.S. Air Force and Navy exercises,” the letter explains. “These aircraft will be used exclusively on the basis of government contracts for support tasks during (inter)national exercises and training on American territory.”
The F-16A/Bs are becoming available as part of the RNLAF’s planned phase-out of the jet, or End Life of Type (ELOT) program. The 12 jets in question are due to become surplus next year, as deliveries of F-35A stealth fighters to the RNLAF continue.
[…]
As well as the 12 Vipers earmarked for Draken, the Dutch government has announced an option for the same firm to acquire another 28 examples, which are planned to be retired from RNLAF service by the end of 2024. Should that follow-on deal be taken up, Draken would end up with a fleet of 40 Vipers, compared to the 29 ex-Israeli F-16A/Bs that were acquired by rival Top Aces.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has announced that its Skyborg autonomy core system, or ACS, successfully completed a flight aboard a General Atomics Avenger unmanned vehicle at Edwards Air Force Base. The Skyborg ACS is a hardware and software suite that acts as the “brain” of autonomous aircraft equipped with the system. The tests add more aircraft to the list of platforms Skyborg has successfully flown on, bringing the Air Force closer to a future in which airmen fly alongside AI-controlled “loyal wingmen.”
The Skyborg-controlled Avenger flew four two and a half hours on June 24, 2021, during the Orange Flag 21-2 Large Force Test Event at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Orange Flag is a training event held by the 412th Test Wing three times a year that “focuses on technical integration and innovation across a breadth of technology readiness levels,” according to an Air Force press release. You can read more about this major testing event in this past feature of ours.
The Avenger started its flight under the control of a human operator before being handed off to the Skyborg “pilot” at a safe altitude. A command and control station on the ground monitored the drone’s flight, during which Skyborg executed “a series of foundational behaviors necessary to characterize safe system operation” including following navigational commands, flying within defined boundaries known as “geo-fences,” adhering to safe flight envelopes, and demonstrating “coordinated maneuvering.”
[…]
The Avenger’s flight at Orange Flag was part of the AFRL’s larger Autonomous Attritable Aircraft Experimentation (AAAx), a program that has already seen the Skyborg ACS tested aboard a Kratos UTAP-22 Mako unmanned aircraft. The AAAx program appears to be aimed at eventually fielding autonomous air vehicles that are low-cost enough to operate in environments where there is a high chance of aircraft being lost, but are also reusable.
As part of that goal, the Skyborg program is developing an artificial intelligence-driven “computer brain” that could eventually autonomously control “loyal wingman” drones or even more advanced unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs). The AFRL wants the system to be able to perform tasks such as taking off and landing, to even making decisions on its own in combat based on situational variables.
The Air Force envisions Skyborg-equipped UAVs to operate both completely autonomously and in networked groups while tethered via datalinks to manned aircraft, all controlled by what the AFRL calls a “modular ACS that can autonomously aviate, navigate, and communicate, and eventually integrate other advanced capabilities.” Skyborg-equipped wingmen fitted with their own pods or sensor systems could easily and rapidly add extended capabilities by linking to manned aircraft flying within line-of-sight of them.
After the program was first revealed in 2019, the Air Force’s then-Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper stated he wanted to see operational demonstrations within two years. The latest test flight of the Skyborg-equipped Avenger shows the service has clearly hit that benchmark.
The General Atomics Avenger was used in experiments with another autonomy system in 2020, developed as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Collaborative Operations in Denied Environment (CODE) program that sought to develop drones that could demonstrate “collaborative autonomy,” or the ability to work cooperatively.
Brigadier General Dale White, Skyborg Program Executive Officer says that the successful Skyborg ACS implementation aboard an Avenger demonstrates the Air Force’s commitment to remaining at the forefront of aerospace innovation. “This type of operational experimentation enables the Air Force to raise the bar on new capabilities, made possible by emerging technologies,” said White, “and this flight is a key milestone in achieving that goal.”
A prototype flying car has completed a 35-minute flight between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakia.
The hybrid car-aircraft, AirCar, is equipped with a BMW engine and runs on regular petrol-pump fuel.
Its creator, Prof Stefan Klein, said it could fly about 1,000km (600 miles), at a height of 8,200ft (2,500m), and had clocked up 40 hours in the air so far.
It takes two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from car into aircraft.
‘Very pleasant’
The narrow wings fold down along the sides of the car.
Prof Klein drove it straight off the runway and into town upon arrival, watched by invited reporters.
He described the experience, early on Monday morning, as “normal” and “very pleasant”.
In the air, the vehicle reached a cruising speed of 170km/h.
It can carry two people, with a combined weight limit of 200kg (31 stone).
[…]
“I have to admit that this looks really cool – but I’ve got a hundred questions about certification,” Dr Wright said.
“Anyone can make an aeroplane but the trick is making one that flies and flies and flies for the thick end of a million hours, with a person on board, without having an incident.
“I can’t wait to see the piece of paper that says this is safe to fly and safe to sell.”
Legendary investor George Soros once said, “Good investing should be boring”. But an increase in volatile themes today suggests this maxim has gone ignored by at least some market participants.
From a high level, we can view investments on a spectrum. Volatile assets like cryptocurrencies and SPACs are more on the exciting side of things. The boring side is likely where Dividend Aristocrat stocks lie.
The data above, from Sure Dividend, looks at all 65 Dividend Aristocrats, ranking them by their yield, sector, and years of growth.
What are Dividend Aristocrats?
The U.S. Dividend Aristocrats are a basket of 65 stocks in the S&P 500 index. These companies have been growing their dividend per share consecutively, for a minimum of 25 years.
This is easier said than done, since companies often distribute dividends quarterly. To pay and grow a dividend in the long run implies a business model that can withstand varying economic environments, including setbacks like market crashes.
Though dividend stocks may not carry the same excitement as other investments, studies show that dividends represent over 50% of total S&P 500 market returns.
Company
Dividend Yield
Years Dividend Grown
Sector
AT&T, Inc.
6.9%
36
Communication Services
Exxon Mobil Corp.
6.1%
38
Energy
Chevron Corp.
5.1%
33
Energy
International Business Machines Corp.
4.9%
25
Technology
Abbvie Inc
4.8%
49
Healthcare
Realty Income Corp.
4.2%
26
Real Estate
People`s United Financial Inc
4.1%
28
Financial Services
Federal Realty Investment Trust
4.0%
53
Real Estate
Consolidated Edison, Inc.
4.0%
47
Utilities
Amcor Plc
3.9%
36
Consumer Cyclical
Showing 1 to 10 of 65 entries
PreviousNext
Numerous companies on this list have brand value that stretches all over the globe—including the likes of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Walmart.
Vast global recognition and branding power is in part why these companies can generate cash flows to pay dividends for decades on end. For instance, 94% of the world population recognizes Coca-Cola’s logo.
Zooming In
The 65 Dividend Aristocrat stocks break down into 11 sectors. Across sectors, Industrials is the most crowded, consisting of 14 companies, with an average yield of 1.6% and a dividend growth duration of 43 years. Popular stocks in this sector include 3M and Caterpillar.
Next is the Consumer Defensive sector, containing 13 companies like Clorox, Target, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble. The average yield is 2.2%, with an average growing duration of 49 years.
The highest yield by sector belongs to Energy, at 5.5%, but is only made up of only Chevron and Exxon Mobil. Their dividend track record may falter in the years to come, due to transitions away from the oil business. Just last year, Big Oil firms reported record net income losses, and Exxon was booted from the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).
The Consumer Cyclical sector has been increasing their dividend for an average of 50 years, the longest of any sector. Lowe’s and McDonald’s are involved in this category.
Businesses for Today and Tomorrow
Although the Dividend Aristocrats list is published every year, the companies on the list are a stable bunch, meaning changes are fairly infrequent.
In a market climate in part shaped by low rates and compressed yields in the fixed income space, Dividend Aristocrats might be a particularly attractive alternative for investors with a longer-term outlook.
Windows 11 was officially unveiled this week, and many eager users are checking to see if their PCs can run the upcoming OS with Microsoft’s Windows Health Check app. However, some are surprised to learn that their PCs aren’t “Windows 11 ready,” despite having new, high-end hardware.
What’s a TPM?
The main source of confusion is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip, which was an uncommon hardware requirement until now. TPMs are a security component that monitors your PC for issues and can protect against potential malware and ransomware attacks. They can also securely store encryption keys, passwords, and other sensitive information locally.
TPMs have been a “soft” requirement for Windows 10 for years, but Microsoft is making them a “hard” requirement for Windows 11 to increase the baseline data security for Windows 11 PCs. Users need a version 2.0 TPM or higher to run Windows 11, along with a DirectX 12-compatible GPU; a supported Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm CPU; 4 GB RAM; and at least 65GBs of storage.
Not everyone needs to upgrade
Microsoft wants Windows 11 to be more resilient against malware, ransomware, and other cybersecurity threats than previous versions of Windows. The company is relying on technology like 2.0 TPMs and UEFI Secure Boot to reach that goal, but TPMs are probably not a component that users consider when buying or building a new PC. This would explain why some PCs are “not Windows 11 ready” even if the rest of the hardware meets the Windows 11 requirements.
However, it’s possible many users already have a TPM without realizing it. Many (but not all) CPUs released in the past few years have a built-in TPM module that needs to be enabled in your computer’s BIOS settings. Windows turns these off by default, and if it isn’t active, it may not show up when Windows Health Check scans your hardware. Accessing and enabling your TPM—and even the name of the setting you need to activate—differs greatly between manufacturers. Consult your CPU or motherboard manufacturer for the proper steps.
What to do if you don’t have a TPM chip
If you don’t have a TPM, the next option is to buy one online and install it yourself. Unfortunately, this will be difficult for the average user.
The first task is to find a compatible TPM. Some CPUs can’t support TPMs, so make sure to research before you buy one…or should I say, if you can buy one—Scalpers are hoarding TPM chips and selling them at prices that are much higher than the MSRP. What is normally a $14-$30 dollar component now costs upwards of $100. It’s not as bad as the current GPU and CPU market, but that’s not saying much.
If you find a compatible 2.0 TPM at a fair price, you then have to open your PC and access the motherboard to install it manually. This will be a challenge for some PCs (especially laptops) and impossible on certain tablets and hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface. Again, do your research before you buy.
If you can’t buy and install a TPM for your current PC, then you’ll need to buy or build a new computer if you want to upgrade to Windows 11. Thankfully, Microsoft intends to support Windows 10 until October 14, 2025, so there’s no pressure to upgrade immediately. Hopefully, the TPM market—and the tech hardware market in general—will stabilize long before then and upgrading won’t be such a hassle.
As you dive deeper into the world of electronics, a good oscilloscope quickly is an indispensable tool. However, for many use cases where you’re debugging low voltage, low speed circuits, that expensive oscilloscope is using only a fraction of its capabilities. As a minimalist alternative for these use cases [fhdm-dev] created Scoppy, a combination of firmware for the Raspberry Pi Pico and an Android app to create a functional oscilloscope.
As you would expect, the specifications are rather limited, capturing a maximum of 100 kpts at a speed of 500 kS/s shared between the two channels. Without some additional front end circuitry to protect the Pico, the input voltage is limited to 0-3.3 V. Neither the app nor the firmware is open source, and getting access to the second channel and removing ads requires a ~$3 in-app purchase. Even so, we can still think of plenty of practical uses for a ~$7 oscilloscope. If you do decide to add some front-end circuitry to change to voltage range, you can set them in the app, and switch between them by pulling certain GPIO pins high or low. The app has most of the basic oscilloscope features covered, continuous and single shot capture, adjustable trigger settings and a scalable waveform display.
China’s National Space Administration has released footage recorded by the country’s Mars probe. The videos and photos taken by the camera installed on the Zhurong rover of the Tianwen-1 spacecraft show the lander deploying a parachute before touching down on the surface of Mars and the rover driving away from its landing platform. State broadcaster CCTV said Zhurong had been working on the red planet for 42 days and had moved 236 metres so far
Western Digital’s popular My Book Live hard drives are being deleted remotely by an unknown attacker, according to the company. And there’s not much anyone can do at this point but unplug their drives from the internet.
“We have determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by a threat actor,” Western Digital’s Jolin Tan told Gizmodo early Friday by email. “In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device.”
[…]
“The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015,” Tan continued. “At this time, we are recommending that customers disconnect their My Book Live devices from the Internet to protect their data on the device.”
Microsoft (MSFT.O) said on Friday an attacker had won access to one of its customer-service agents and then used information from that to launch hacking attempts against customers.
The company said it had found the compromise during its response to hacks by a team it identifies as responsible for earlier major breaches at SolarWinds (SWI.N) and Microsoft.
Microsoft said it had warned the affected customers. A copy of one warning seen by Reuters said the attacker belonged to the group Microsoft calls Nobelium and that it had access during the second half of May.
[…]
Microsoft said it had also found the breach of its own agent, who it said had limited powers.
The agent could see billing contact information and what services the customers pay for, among other things.
“The actor used this information in some cases to launch highly-targeted attacks as part of their broader campaign,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft warned affected customers to be careful about communications to their billing contacts and consider changing those usernames and email addresses, as well as barring old usernames from logging in.
Microsoft said it was aware of three entities that had been compromised in the phishing campaign.
It did not immediately clarify whether any had been among those whose data was viewed through the support agent, or if the agent had been tricked by the broader campaign.
Microsoft did not say whether the agent was at a contractor or a direct employee.
A spokesman said the latest breach by the threat actor was not part of Nobelium’s previous successful attack on Microsoft, in which it obtained some source code.
In the SolarWinds attack, the group altered code at that company to access SolarWinds customers, including nine U.S. federal agencies.
[…]
A White House official said the latest intrusion and phishing campaign was far less serious than the SolarWinds fiasco.
“This appears to be largely unsuccessful, run-of-the-mill espionage,” the official said.
While a lot of focus has been on the TPM requirements for Windows 11, Microsoft has since updated its documentation to provide a complete list of supported processors. At present the list includes only Intel 8th Generation Core processors or newer, and AMD Ryzen Zen+ processors or newer, effectively limiting Windows 11 to PC less than 4-5 years old.
Originally, Microsoft noted that CPU generation requirements are a “soft floor” limit for the Windows 11 installer, which should have allowed some older CPUs to be able to install Windows 11 with a warning, but hours after we published this story, the company updated that page to explicitly require the list of chips above.
Many Windows 10 users have been downloading Microsoft’s PC Health App (available here) to see whether Windows 11 works on their systems, only to find it fails the check… This is the first significant shift in Windows hardware requirements since the release of Windows 8 back in 2012, and the CPU changes are understandably catching people by surprise.
Microsoft is also requiring a front-facing camera for all Windows 11 devices except desktop PCs from January 2023 onwards.
“In order to run Windows 11, devices must meet the hardware specifications,” explains Microsoft’s official compatibility page for Windows 11.
“Devices that do not meet the hardware requirements cannot be upgraded to Windows 11.”
Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.
But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.
Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.
To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.
And here’s how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldn’t equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.
What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.
[…]
What this secret information reveals is that while most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country’s richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system.
One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year.
The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.
Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.
About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone — including the very richest Americans — to take money they’d stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam — a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.
[…]
Among this rarefied group, ProPublica found, the term “individual retirement account” has become a misnomer. Rather than a way to build a nest egg for old age, the accounts have morphed into supercharged investment vehicles subsidized by American taxpayers. Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4 million in his Roth account at the end of 2018. Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.
Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it. Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had $31.5 million in his Roth, the records show.
[…]
And thanks to the Roth, Thiel’s fortune is far more vast than even experts in tallying the wealth of the rich believed. In 2019, Forbes put Thiel’s total net worth at just $2.3 billion. That was less than half of what his Roth alone was worth.
The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country’s lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance’s local unit wasn’t permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities…
Binance Markets Ltd., the company’s U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. “A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards” under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. “Of the firms we’ve assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention.”
Japan’s financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn’t registered to do business in the country…
As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters… The FCA move doesn’t ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance’s non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn’t directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin.
The Financial Times called the move “one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance” and “a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection.” But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance’s business. In April, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus.
And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada’s most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.
According to Wired, however, at least one researcher has found a way to avoid most of this trouble, drawing cash from ATMs like magic with a simple flick of his wrist. The outlet reported Thursday that Josep Rodriguez, a researcher and consultant at security firm IOActive, has built up a collection of bugs affecting NFC systems—a.k.a. near-field communication—which many modern machines rely on to wirelessly transmit data, including debit and credit card info.
Rodriguez, who’s hired to legally test machines to improve their security, has been able to use NFC readers to trigger what programmers call a “buffer overflow,” or excess of data that corrupts a machine’s memory. This decades-old attack has allowed Rodriguez to exploit ATMs and other point-of-sale machines—think retail store checkout machines—in a variety of ways: capturing payment card info, injecting malware, and even in one case “jackpotting” an ATM, which is exactly what it sounds like:
“Rodriguez has built an Android app that allows his smartphone to mimic those credit card radio communications and exploit flaws in the NFC systems’ firmware. With a wave of his phone, he can exploit a variety of bugs to crash point-of-sale devices, hack them to collect and transmit credit card data, invisibly change the value of transactions, and even lock the devices while displaying a ransomware message.”
According to Wired, Rodriguez has kept his findings under wraps for around a year and is otherwise legally bound not to reveal the identities of certain companies he’s worked for. Nevertheless, being bothered that a decades-old technique is still affecting a host of modern machines, he intends to disclosure more technical details in the coming weeks in an effort to call attention to, as Wired puts it, “the abysmal state of embedded device security more broadly.”
Which is why people think Responsible Disclosure is important – ie telling a company about a flaw and then giving them a reasonable time frame to fix it before going public with the full details of the flaw. If you don’t do it, the problem doesn’t get fixed.
For the past few years, a YouTuber known as Krollywood has painstakingly recreated every level from GoldenEye 007 inside the level editor of Far Cry 5. This week, Ubisoft removed all of those levels from Far Cry 5 due to a copyright infringement claim.
Kotakufirst reported on Krollywood’s efforts earlier this month. Over the course of three years, in an endeavor that tallied more than 1,400 hours, Krollywood recreated every stage from GoldenEye 007, the classic N64 shooter (well, save for the two bonus levels). It was an impressive effort: a modernized recreation of a beloved yet tough-to-find old game. And it looked great, too.
You could find and play these levels yourself by hopping into Far Cry 5’s arcade mode and punching in Krollywood’s username. As of this writing, you no longer can. Ubisoft removed them all from Far Cry 5, a move that Krollywood described as “really sad,” noting that he probably won’t be able to restore them since he’s “on their radar now.”
“I’m really sad—not because of myself or the work I put in the last three years, [but] because of the players who wanna play it or bought Far Cry just to play my levels,” Krollywood told Kotaku in an email today.
When reached for comment, a representative for Ubisoft kicked over this statement:
In following the guidelines within the ‘Terms of Use’, there were maps created within Far Cry 5 arcade that have been removed due to copyright infringement claims from a right [sic] holder received by Ubisoft and are currently unavailable. We respect the intellectual property rights of others and expect our users to do the same. This matter is currently with the map’s creator and the rights holder and we have nothing further to share at this time.
Ubisoft did not immediately respond to follow-up requests asking whether the rights holder mentioned is MGM, which controls the license to the original GoldenEye 007.
The rights around the GoldenEye 007 game have been stuck in a quagmire for decades. Famously, Rare, the developer of the original game, planned a remake for the Xbox 360. That was cancelled in 2008. (Years later, Xbox boss Phil Spencer chalked up the cancellation to the legal rights issues being “challenging.”) That canned remake resurfaced as a full 4K60 longplay via a leak this January, with a playable version making the rounds online shortly after. A Kotaku report concluded: It was fun.
It is further unclear how, exactly, Krollywood’s map remakes in Far Cry 5 harm MGM at all—or how it violates Ubisoft’s terms of service in the first place. Krollywood didn’t use any assets or code from the original game. He didn’t attempt to sell it or otherwise turn a profit. And MGM doesn’t own any of the code from Ubisoft’s open-world shooter.
A sampling of Krollywood’s efforts…Image: Krollywood / Ubisoft
Those corpses represent every attempt to play GoldenEye 007 in any other format than the original game.Image: Krollywood / Ubisoft
Some of the remade levels stoke major wanderlust.Image: Krollywood / Ubisoft
Players just want a taste of nostalgia, and MGM has a track record of shattering the plates before they’re even delivered to the table. (Recall GoldenEye 25, the fan remake of GoldenEye 007 remade entirely in Unreal 4 that was lawyered into oblivion last year.) MGM has further neglected to do anything with the license it’s sitting on—for a game that’s older than the Game Boy Color, by the way. At the end of the day, shooting this latest fan-made project out of the sky comes across as a punitive move, at best.
“In the beginning, I started this project just for me and my best friend, because we loved the original game so much,” Krollywood said. “But there are many GoldenEye fans out there … [The project] found many new fans and I’m so happy about it.”
Russia was back up to its age-old spoofing of GPS tracks earlier this week before a showdown between British destroyer HMS Defender and coastguard ships near occupied Crimea in the Black Sea.
Yesterday Defender briefly sailed through Ukrainian waters, triggering the Russian Navy and coastguard into sending patrol boats and anti-shipping aircraft to buzz the British warship in a fruitless effort to divert her away from occupied Crimea’s waters.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and has occupied parts of the region, mostly in the Crimean peninsula, ever since. The UK and other NATO allies do not recognise Ukraine as enemy-held territory so Defender was sailing through an ally’s waters – and doing so through a published traffic separation scheme (similar to the TSS in the English Channel), as Defence Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed this afternoon.*
Yet, among yesterday’s drama and tension, Russia had previously spoofed maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals to show Defender and her Dutch flotilla mate HNLMS Evertsen as sailing straight for the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, southwest Crimea. Neither warship was doing that: while Russia was claiming NATO warships were threatening Russia, both vessels were captured on live webcams in another Ukrainian port.
The latest batch of AIS fiddling took place on 17 June, according to naval analyst HI Sutton, writing for the US Naval Institute’s blog: “Despite the AIS track, there is clear evidence that the two warships did not leave Odessa.”
This week’s tensions should remind the world that Russia has no compunction about interfering with widely available tech systems.
[…]
AIS works on an honesty-based system, at its simplest. The all-but-mandatory system (ships below 300 tons are exempt) works through each ship at sea broadcasting its GPS coordinates. Other ships receive those signals and assemble them onto display screens mounted on the vessel’s bridge for crew to monitor, usually as part of an integrated ECDIS system. It’s an insecure system insofar as vulns exist that allow spoofing of AIS data, as first revealed almost a decade ago. Shore stations can also receive and rebroadcast AIS signals, amplifying them – and providing a vector for the unscrupulous to insert their own preferred data.
[…]
AIS spoofing is similar to GPS spoofing in that broadcasting false data can mislead the wider world. Back in 2018, researchers built a GPS-spoofing unit out of a Raspberry Pi, transmitting false location data to confuse a targeted car’s satnav.
This proof-of-concept unit using consumer-grade, readily available equipment merely spells out what nation states such as Russia (and the West, naturally) have been toying with for years. Western GPS spoofing is a fact of life in the Eastern Mediterranean, as frustrated airline pilots and air traffic controllers know all too well, and the effects of AIS spoofing are very similar for those who depend on public datafeeds to keep up with the world around them.
We’ve written so many stories about how you don’t own what you’ve bought any more due to software controls, DRM, and ridiculous contracts, and it keeps getting worse. The latest such example involves Peloton, which is most known for its extremely expensive stationary bikes with video screens, so that you can take classes (usually on a monthly subscription). I will admit that I don’t quite understand the attraction to them, but so many people swear by them. The company also has branched out into extremely expensive treadmills with the same basic concept
[…]
Peloton announced that they will refund the machine, which costs $4,295, and are working on a mandatory software update that will automatically lock the Tread+ after each use and require a unique password to be used to unlock the machine.
That automatic lock and password idea sounds sensible enough, given the situation, but in order to get it to work, but apparently Peloton hasn’t figured out how to make that work for customers who bought the treadmill and aren’t using its subscription service for classes. The Tread+ does have a “Just Run” mode, in which it acts like a regular treadmill (with the video screen off). But, as Brianna Wu discovered, the company is now saying that the “Just Run” mode now requires a subscription to work with the lock. The company is waiving the cost of such a subscription for three months, and it’s unclear from the email if that means that after the three months they’re hoping to have the “Tread Lock” working even for non-subscription users:
Wow. The Peloton Tread will no longer allow you to use your $3000 treadmill without a $39.99 a month subscription.
The pretext is their design issues that led to a child’s death.
If you can’t see it, the image is an email from Peloton customer support saying:
We care deeply about the safety and well-being of our Members and we created Tread Lock to secure your Tread+ against unauthorized access.
Unfortunately at this time, ‘Just Run’ is no longer accessible without a Peloton Membership.
For this inconvenience, we have waived three months of All-Access Membership for all Tread+ owners. If you don’t see the waivers on your subscription or if you need help reactivating your subscription, please contact our Support team….
Now, it’s possible that the subscription part is necessary to update the software to enable the lock mode, but that seems… weird. After all, there must have been some sort of software upgrade that locked out the “Just Run” mode in the first place.
The fallout from yesterday’s incident in the Black Sea involving the U.K. Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender and elements of Russia’s military and internal security forces has taken its next turn, with the release of a video showing some of the events from the perspective of a Russian Border Guard patrol ship. The footage clearly shows the Russian vessel opening fire, as the Kremlin had asserted, but it’s also obvious that Defender was so far away at the time that it may well not have been aware this were being directed at it, in line with what British authorities have said.
The video in question was published online by the Russian Ministry of Defense’s official television station, TV Zvezda, and the state-run media outlet RIA Novosti. It was taken from the bridge of a Russian Border Guard Rubin class patrol boat, one of those that purportedly “stopped” HMS Defender yesterday from sailing within what the Kremlin claims are its territorial waters around Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014. The United Kingdom, among many other members of the intentional community, does not recognize Russia’s authority over Crimea.
BBC NEWS SCREENCAP
A Project 22460 Rubin class border patrol vessel moves in close to HMS Defender, as seen in BBC News footage.
The video includes the discussions between the Russian Border Guards and the crew of the British destroyer, with repeated demands from the Russian security forces that HMS Defender leave the area. Two Border Guard vessels are seen trailing the destroyer, while Russian jets pass overhead, and at one point, one of the Russian vessels shadows the British warship closely — a BBC journalist’s account yesterday spoke of one of the Russian vessels getting as close as 100 meters (328 feet).
One of the Border Guards is heard to say that HMS Defender is breaking the rules of innocent passage, a part of international maritime law that allows warships to move through another country’s territorial waters so long as the transit meets various criteria, particularly that it is not intended to challenge the legitimacy of any such maritime boundaries.
After several more warnings, apparently ignored by the British, one of the crew members aboard the Border Guard vessel says, in Russian: “Perform precautionary fire! Perform precautionary fire! Avoid hit! Avoid hit! Fire!”
At that point, we see the AK-630 six-barrel 30mm Gatling gun on the bow of the Border Guard vessel opening fire with several bursts, although at this point the British destroyer is seen on the horizon. Interestingly, in the BBC News report, it’s confirmed that shots were fired by the Russian side, “but they were well out of range.”
After the shots, HMS Defender confirms that it will continue to follow its internationally recognized route into international waters. This suggests that the warship continued its planned passage and the available maritime tracking data doesn’t show it making any obvious changes in course.
Note that “Unverified maritime tracking data” of “around 10 nautical miles” seems to be supported by 🛰️Sentinel-2 imagery.
The available tracks are also consistent with official British accounts that the destroyer was sailing around 12 miles off the coast of Crimea. While Russia considered this to be “a flagrant violation of international norms and standards,” in the words of Sergei Tsekov, a Russian senator from the Crimea region, for the British, this amounted to “a routine transit [in] an internationally recognized traffic separation corridor,” according to the U.K. Minister of Defense Ben Wallace.
The thick purple line is for traffic separation. The Royal Navy is right, there is a shipping lane there, but it’s very much in the territorial waters around Crimea, and it’s not normal for them to use it.
Furthermore, since, as already noted, the United Kingdom does not recognize Russia’s claims over Crimea, the waters in question are considered Ukrainian from the British government’s perspective.
BBC NEWS SCREENCAP
A Crimea-based Russian Navy Be-12 Mail amphibian flies over HMS Defender.
All in all, the video shows that Russia did at least go through the motions of taking some aggressive action, but doesn’t provide conclusive evidence that this was sufficient to actually force HMS Defender out of waters that it claims as its own.
While it’s clear that some kind of warning shots were fired, it’s also plausible that the British may not have realized what these were, and instead connected them to training exercises that were already happening in the vicinity. At least, the British would have been aware of the threat of warning shots, but their response may have been intended to deliberately provoke the Russians.
Screenshots of a Black Sea Fleet Project 22160 patrol ship, likely the Pavel Derzhavin, and Su-24M bombers. 34/ pic.twitter.com/JvOxQjT2kK
“We believe the Russians were undertaking a gunnery exercise in the Black Sea and provided the maritime community with prior warning of their activity,” the U.K. Ministry of Defense tweeted yesterday. “No shots were directed at HMS Defender and we do not recognize the claim that bombs were dropped in her path.”
Those bombs were, according to Russian accounts, dropped across the path of the destroyer by a Su-24M Fencer combat jet, to provide an additional warning to the British warship. So far, we have seen no evidence of the bombs actually being dropped, although video from a BBC News report yesterday does at least show a Su-24M in the vicinity seemingly carrying high-explosive bombs. The BBC also reported that the crew of the Defender was aware of the presence of at least 20 Russian military aircraft flying the area over the course of the incident.
BBC NEWS SCREENCAP
A Russian Navy Su-24M buzzes HMS Defender, apparently carrying unguided bombs under its wings and below the fuselage.
Rosoboronexport
An OFAB-500 freefall bomb, as reportedly used by a Russian Su-24M as a warning to the destroyer.
All in all, it seems that this latest footage released by Russia is intended to bolster its account of what happened yesterday, which is based around its military and security forces taking strong action to ward off HMS Defender from what it deemed a territorial violation. Since the incident yesterday, Russian news outlet Kommersant has also published a map showing areas around Crimea that were reportedly temporarily closed for military drills, one of which HMS Defender apparently passed through.
Map from Kommersant of yesterday’s incident. The orange spots are the areas Russia temporarily closed from April 24-October 31, which they announced during the spring buildup. The HMS Defender apparently passed through one of these areas. 38/https://t.co/cqOsi7mfsApic.twitter.com/IrUB1V88Q4
While the British side has not mentioned these apparent restrictions, or whether it was aware of them, it was seemingly entirely deliberate in choosing this particular route for its warship and would have known that it would trigger a response of some kind from Russia. For the British, however, the importance of this incident was in demonstrating its right to innocent passage using a route through internationally recognized waters, while signaling its resolve to its partner Ukraine.
With the largest-ever Sea Breeze exercise due to start next Monday, there is every indication that tensions around Crimea and in the wider Black Sea region will only increase in the coming days, as 32 warships, plus dozens of aircraft, enter these region to commence U.S. Navy-led drills under the watchful eyes of the Russians.
As for the warning shots yesterday, while their effectiveness must be considered debatable at best, the fact that such belligerent actions are now being taken confirms the very differing views that Russia and NATO have when it comes to the movements of naval vessels and aircraft in the Black Sea region.
A pair of South African brothers have vanished, along with Bitcoin worth $3.6 billion from their cryptocurrency investment platform.
A Cape Town law firm hired by investors says they can’t locate the brothers and has reported the matter to the Hawks, an elite unit of the national police force. It’s also told crypto exchanges across the globe should any attempt be made to convert the digital coins.
Following a surge in Bitcoin’s value in the past year, the disappearance of about 69,000 coins — worth more than $4 billion at their April peak — would represent the biggest-ever dollar loss in a cryptocurrency scam. The incident could spur regulators’ efforts to impose order on the market amid rising cases of fraud.
The first signs of trouble came in April, as Bitcoin was rocketing to a record. Africrypt Chief Operating Officer Ameer Cajee, the elder brother, informed clients that the company was the victim of a hack. He asked them not to report the incident to lawyers and authorities, as it would slow down the recovery process of the missing funds.
Lawyers Hired
Some skeptical investors roped in the law firm, Hanekom Attorneys, and a separate group started liquidation proceedings against Africrypt.
“We were immediately suspicious as the announcement implored investors not to take legal action,” Hanekom Attorneys said in response to emailed questions. “Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack.”
The firm’s investigation found Africrypt’s pooled funds were transferred from its South African accounts and client wallets, and the coins went through tumblers and mixers — or to other large pools of bitcoin — to make them essentially untraceable.
Calls to a mobile number for Cajee were immediately directed to a voicemail service. He and his brother, Raees, 20, set up Africrypt in 2019 and it provided bumper returns for investors. Calls to Raees also went straight to voicemail. The company website is down.
The saga is unfolding after last year’s collapse of another South African Bitcoin trader, Mirror Trading International. The losses there, involving about 23,000 digital coins, totaled about $1.2 billion in what was called the biggest crypto scam of 2020, according to a report by Chainalysis. Africrypt investors stand to lose three times as much.
While South Africa’s Finance Sector Conduct Authority is also looking into Africrypt, it is currently prohibited from launching a formal investigation because crypto assets are not legally considered financial products, according to the regulator’s head of enforcement, Brandon Topham. The police have not yet responded to a request for comment.
Hyundai this morning announced that it has completed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics. The deal, which values the innovative robotics company at $1.1 billion, was announced in late-2020. The companies have not disclosed any future financial details.
The South Korean automotive giant now owns a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics, previously belonging to SoftBank. The Japanese investment company was effectively a transitional owner, purchasing Boston Dynamics from Google, which owned the company for just over three years.
While its time with Softbank wasn’t much longer than its stint under Google/Alphabet X, Boston Dynamics saw the commercialization of its first two products since launching nearly 30 years ago. The company brought its quadrupedal robot Spot to market and this year announced the (still upcoming) launch of Stretch, an updated version of its warehouse robot, Handle.
In a recent appearance at TechCrunch’s Mobility event, Hyundai’s Ernestine Fu discussed the planned acquisition of an 80% controlling interest in the company. Fu noted that Hyundai’s New Horizon Studios has previewed multiple “walking” car concepts that look poised to build on decades of Boston Dynamics research.
“With New Horizon Studios, the mandate is reimagining what you can do when you combine robotics with traditional wheeled locomotion, like walking robots and walking vehicles,” Fu told TechCrunch. “Obviously the technology that [Boston Dynamics] has put together plays a key role in enabling those sorts of concepts to come to life.”
As it has changed hands over the years, Boston Dynamics has long insisted on maintaining its own research wing, which has given us less commercial technology, like the humanoid robot, Atlas. How this will function under the umbrella of Hyundai remains to be seen, though the company does seem to have a vested interest in maintaining a forward-looking approach.
With graphics cards seeming harder to get than ever, China’s stricter measures against Bitcoin mining have led to lower prices online in the country.
In Yunnan, the country’s fourth-largest Bitcoin-producing province, authorities have been investigating illegal electrical power use tied to Bitcoin mining and are threatening to cut power to those involved in the practice. As SCMP reports, it’s the latest province to join the country’s clampdown on crypto.
In 2020, China made up 65 percent of Bitcoin’s global hash rate.
SCMP now reports that stricter measures towards Bitcoin are driving down the prices of graphics cards in China. Graphics cards aren’t only used for gaming, but for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as they provide the extra computer power needed in the computations necessary to mine digital currencies.
As the Chinese government has been putting the squeeze on crypto, Sichuan province remained a holdout for mining operations. But, as SCMP adds, Sichuan has called for all mining to cease, dashing the hopes of miners to take advantage of the province’s hydropower. Now, miners are apparently looking at moving operations outside China to friendlier areas.
All of this has caused the prices of graphics cards to drop online in China. In May, the Asus RTX 3060 was commanding as much as 13,499 yuan ($2,085), but SCMP reports that prices have dropped to 4,699 yuan ($725).
That’s not the only thing to drop. According to CNN, the value of Bitcoin has dropped in the wake of China’s measures.
