U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday said they have charged eight individuals in a securities fraud scheme, alleging they reaped about $114 million from by using Twitter and Discord to manipulate stocks.
The eight men allegedly purported to be successful traders on the social media platforms and then engaged in a so-called “pump and dump” scheme by hyping particular stocks to their followers with the intent to dump them once prices had risen, according to prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it has filed related civil charges against the defendants in the scheme, claiming that seven of the defendants used Twitter and Discord to boost stocks. It said the eighth was charged with aiding and abetting the scheme with his podcast.
[…]
The individuals charged were Texas residents Edward Constantinescu, Perry Matlock, John Rybarczyk and Dan Knight, along with California residents Gary Deel and Tom Cooperman, Stefan Hrvatin of Miami and Mitchell Hennessey of Hoboken, New Jersey.
Polestar is delivering a not-so-subtle snub to Mercedes’ subscription performance upgrade. The automaker has released an update that gives the Polestar 2’s long range dual motor variant a 68HP power boost (plus 15lb. ft. of torque) in the US and Canada for a one-time $1,195 fee. That’s far from a trivial expense, but it’s a decidedly better value than Merc’s $1,200 annual fee for EQS and EQE acceleration improvements.
The software tuning gives the Polestar 2 a total 476HP with 502lb. ft. of torque. That’s enough to cut the 0-60MPH time to 4.2 seconds (normally 4.5), and it shaves half a second off the 50-70MPH dash (now 2.2 seconds). Polestar says you’ll mainly notice the added grunt in the 44MPH to 80MPH range, so this update may be most helpful when you’re overtaking someone on the highway.
You can buy the update through the Polestar web shop, and it will apply over the air. It’s included with a new vehicle if you opt for the $5,000 Performance pack. You won’t have to visit a store, then. There’s no word of a comparable upgrade for the single motor Polestar 2 variant, or availability in other regions.
After putting unique usernames on the auction on the TON blockchain, Telegram is now putting anonymous numbers up for bidding. These numbers could be used to sign up for Telegram without needing any SIM card.
Just like the username auction, you can buy these virtual numbers on Fragment, which is a site specially created for Telegram-related auctions. To buy a number, you will have to link your TON wallet (Tonkeeper) to the website.
You can buy a random number for as low as 9 toncoins, which is equivalent to roughly $16.50 at the time of writing. Some of the premium virtual numbers — such as +888-8-888 — are selling for 31,500 toncoins (~$58,200).
Notably, you can only use this number to sign up for Telegram. You can’t use it to receive SMS or calls or use it to register for another service.
For Telegram, this is another way of asking its most loyal supporters to support the app by helping it make some money. The company launched its premium subscription plan earlier this year. On Tuesday, the chat app’s founder Pavel Durov said that Telegram has more than 1 million paid users just a few months after the launch of its premium features. While Telegram offers features like cross-device sync and large groups, it’s important to remember that chats are not protected by end-to-end encryption.
As for folks who want anonymization, Telegram already offers you to hide your phone number. Alternatively, there are tons of virtual phone number services out there — including Google Voice, Hushed, and India-based Doosra — that allow you receive calls and SMS as well.
It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when Sony removed a useful feature on its PlayStation 3 console after the public had already begun buying it, which is downright insane. But while that was an entire console being impacted, the lesson has been repeated in instances where games and mobile apps simply stop working when the maker decides to shut their servers down, or purchased DLC disappearing for the same reason.
And here we are again, with the announcement that Onoma, previously Square Enix Montreal, is going to be shuttering some of its mobile games. The end result is not that new purchases won’t be available. Instead, the game will just not be a thing anymore. Anywhere.
Arena Battle Champions, Deus Ex GO, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes will be shutting down on January 4th. The games will be removed from the App Store/Google Play Store on December 1st, and current players will not be able to access the games past January 4th.
Effective immediately, in-game purchases are stopped. We encourage prior in-game purchases to be used before January 4th, as they will not be refunded. On behalf of the development team, we would like to thank you for playing our games.
Deus Ex Go costs $6 on the Google Play Store. You can go buy it right damned now if you wanted to. But why would you, given that the game will simply brick and no longer function in five weeks? And, more importantly, did any of the 500k-plus people who downloaded the game over the years know that it disappearing was a possibility? I mean, I’m sure that buried in the ToS is the standard “you’re just licensing this for as long as we let you” language exists, but I’m also sure that the vast majority of the people who paid for the game didn’t realize this would be a possibility.
Mercedes raised some worried eyebrows with its recent announcement to offer additional power for its EVs via subscription. For electric EQE and EQS models, Mercedes will bump their horsepower if customers pay an additional $1,200 per year. However, that’s going to remain a U.S. market service only for the time being, as Europe currently won’t allow Mercedes to offer it, according to this report from Top Gear NL.
A spokesperson for Mercedes Netherlands told Top Gear NL that legal matters currently prevent Mercedes from offering a subscription-based power upgrade. However, the spokesperson declined to comment further, so it’s currently unknown what sort of laws block such subscription-based services. Especially when there are other subscription services that are available in Europe, such as BMW’s heated seat subscription. Automakers can also update a car’s horsepower, via free over-the-air service updates, as both Polestar and Tesla do so in Europe. But that comes at no extra cost and is a one-time, permanent upgrade. So there seems to be some sort of legal issue with charging a yearly subscription for horsepower.
In the U.S. market, Mercedes’ $1,200 yearly subscription gets EQE and EQS owners nearly a 100 horsepower gain. However, because it’s only software that unlocks the power, it’s obvious that the powertrain is capable of that much power regardless of subscription. So customers might feel cheated that they’re paying for a car with a powertrain that’s intentionally hamstrung from the factory, with its full potential hidden behind a paywall.
Let’s hope that this gets regulated properly at EU level – it’s bizarre that you can’t use something you paid for because it’s disabled and can be re-enabled remotely.
Intel and AMD did something like this in 2010 in a process called binning where they artificially disabled features in the hardware:
As Engadget rather calmly points out, Intel has been testing the waters with a new “Upgrade Card” system, which essentially involves buying a $50 scratch card with a code that unlocks features in your PC’s processor.
The guys at Hardware.info broke this story last month, although nobody seemed to notice right away—perhaps because their site’s in Dutch. The article shows how the upgrade key unlocks “an extra megabyte L3 cache and Hyper Threading” on the Pentium G6951. In its locked state, that 2.8GHz processor has two physical cores, two threads, and 3MB of L3 cache, just like the retail-boxed Pentium G6950.
[…]
Detractors of the scheme might point out that Intel is making customers pay for features already present in the CPU they purchased. That’s quite true. However, as the Engadget post notes, both Intel and AMD have been selling CPUs with bits and pieces artificially disabled for years. That practice is known as binning—sometimes, chipmakers use it to unload parts with malfunctioning components; other times, it’s more about product segmentation and demand. There have often been unofficial workarounds, too. These days, for example, quite a few AMD motherboards let you unlock cores in Athlon II X3 and Phenom II X2 processors. Intel simply seems to be offering an official workaround for its CPUs… and cashing in on it.
Ticketmaster’s chaotic handling of Taylor Swift’s tour ticket sales has brought the company under increased scrutiny, including from lawmakers. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, have announced a hearing to gather evidence on competition in the ticketing industry. They have yet to confirm when the hearing will take place or the witnesses that the committee will call upon.
Swift’s fans overwhelmed Ticketmaster’s systems in the gold rush for tickets to her first tour in five years. Ticketmaster says presale codes went out to 1.5 million people, but 14 million (including “a staggering number” of bots) tried to buy tickets. The company said it was slammed with 3.5 billion total system requests, four times its previous peak. When fans were able to make it to the seat selection screen, many effectively had tickets snatched out of their hands as tried to put them in their carts.
There was supposed to be a general sale for the remaining tickets last Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled that, citing “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.” Even though the level of interest in Swift’s stadium shows was evidently through the roof, Ticketmaster’s management of the process has raised a lot of questions. Swift said Ticketmaster assured her and her team that it could handle the demand. However, she said the mayhem “pissed me off.”
[…]
“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets. The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “That’s why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”
Nepali workers hired to pick fruit on British farms say they have been left thousands of pounds in debt after being sent home only weeks after they arrived.
The fruit pickers were recruited under the government’s seasonal worker scheme and say they were offered work for six months. But less than two months after arriving, they were told they were no longer needed and instructed to book flights home.
[…]
Even those workers who did not seek the services of recruitment agents paid about £1,500 each for plane tickets and visa fees before setting foot in the UK. One said that while he had just about managed to pay off his debts, he could not afford the airline charges, which could be as high as £200, to change his return flight,
[…]
The findings will fuel concerns about the treatment of migrant workers under the UK’s seasonal worker scheme [which] allows people to work on UK farms for a maximum of six months. Under the scheme, they cannot stay long-term, claim benefits or bring their families.
The number of seasonal work visas issued by the Home Office each year has surged since their launch in 2019, from 2,500 in the first year to an estimated 40,000 in 2022, including many from outside Europe. But the scheme has been blighted by claims of exploitation, with reports earlier this year alleging some workers from Nepal and Indonesia were being charged steep recruitment fees by third-party job brokers, placing them at risk of debt bondage.
[…]
Documents seen by the Observer show the workers were initially told they would be coming to the UK to work on a farm for six months. But about 10 days before they set out, they were informed that this placement had been cancelled and that they would now go to a different farm.
The workers, who had already bought flights and visas, were told the new placement would be for two months rather than six, but say they believed that, after it ended, they would be transferred to another farm. Emails from AG show they were assured there would be “a lot of work” and the chance to earn “good money”.
The workers subsequently travelled to the UK and began work at a farm run by Gaskains in Faversham, Kent. But when those shifts ended less than two months later, they were told by AG that there was nowhere else for them to go.
[…]
Workers questioned why they were recruited near the end of the season and say they would not have come had they known there would only be two months’ work.
“They must know the season is about to end. We didn’t realise that as [it was] the first time we were coming here,” said Kamal*, who is planning to sell off some family land to cover the debts he accrued to come to work in the UK. “Why did they hire us during the end of the season? It would have been better if they hadn’t hired us at all.”
[…]
he early termination of the workers’ jobs would have left them in “complete shock”. “If they manage to buy new flights in time to avoid eviction, that wipes out most of what they earned. But if they can’t, they risk sleeping rough and working illegally on the black market, where they are completely vulnerable,” she said.
[…]
the company said workers were required to “maintain communication with their sponsor as per immigration rules” and could be blacklisted from future work with AG if they did not. It added that it was not responsible for costs incurred by workers for changing their return tickets.
The Federal Trade Commission issued a statement today that restores the agency’s policy of rigorously enforcing the federal ban on unfair methods of competition. Congress gave the FTC the unique authority to identify and police against these practices, beyond what the other antitrust statutes cover. But in recent years the agency has not always carried out that responsibility consistently. The FTC’s previous policy restricted its oversight to a narrower set of circumstances, making it harder for the agency to challenge the full array of anticompetitive behavior in the market. Today’s statement removes this restriction and declares the agency’s intent to exercise its full statutory authority against companies that use unfair tactics to gain an advantage instead of competing on the merits.
“When Congress created the FTC, it clearly commanded us to crack down on unfair methods of competition,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “Enforcers have to use discretion, but that doesn’t give us the right to ignore a central part of our mandate. Today’s policy statement reactivates Section 5 and puts us on track to faithfully enforce the law as Congress designed.”
Congress passed the Federal Trade Commission Act in 1914 because it was unhappy with the enforcement of the Sherman Act, the original antitrust statute. Section 5 of the FTC Act bans “unfair methods of competition” and instructs the Commission to enforce that prohibition.
In 2015, however, the Commission issued a statement declaring that it would apply Section 5 using the Sherman Act “rule of reason” test, which asks whether a given restraint of trade is “reasonable” in economic terms. The new statement replaces that policy and explains that limiting Section 5 to the rule of reason contradicted the text of the statute and Congress’s clear desire for it to go beyond the Sherman Act. And it shows how the Commission will police the boundary between fair and unfair competition through both enforcement and rulemaking. The statement makes clear that the agency is committed to protecting markets and keeping up with the evolving nature of anticompetitive behavior.
Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market. The Policy Statement lays out the Commission’s approach to policing them. It is the result of many months of work across agency departments. Staff researched the legislative history of Section 5 and its interpretation across hundreds of Commission decisions, consent orders, and court decisions—including more than a dozen Supreme Court opinions. This rich case history will guide the agency as it implements Section 5. Through enforcement and rulemaking, the Commission will put businesses on notice about how to compete fairly and legally. This is in contrast with the rule of reason, which requires judges to make difficult case-by-case economic predictions.
After years of complaining about the monopolies in big tech and China actually championing business competition with the EU lagging behind, will the US finally get into the game? Better late than never.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington accuses Apple and Amazon of seeking to eliminate third-party Apple resellers on Amazon Marketplace in a scheme to stifle competition, and maintain premium pricing for Apple products.
[…]
The lawsuit says the parties’ illegal agreement brought the number of third-party sellers of Apple products on Amazon Marketplace from roughly 600 to just seven sellers – a loss of 98%, and by doing so, Amazon, which was formerly a marginal seller of Apple products, became the dominant seller of Apple products on Amazon Marketplace.
[…]
The lawsuit centers around an agreement made between Apple and Amazon that took effect at the beginning of 2019, the existence of which neither defendant denies. The agreement permitted Apple to limit the number of resellers operating on Amazon’s marketplace, and it offered Amazon in return a discounted wholesale price for a steady stream of iPhones and iPads, allowing it to reap the benefits of limited competition on its own reseller arena.
“From the outset of these discussions, the parties discussed ‘gating’ third-party resellers,” the lawsuit states. “Ultimately Apple proposed, and Amazon agreed, to limit the number of resellers in each country to no more than 20. This arbitrary and purely quantitative threshold excluded even Authorized Resellers of Apple products.”
[…]
According to the lawsuit, available data indicate that there were at least 100 unique resellers offering iPhones and at least 500 resellers of iPads on Amazon’s platform before the agreement, and after, no more than seven remained, a decrease of 98% of third-party Apple product resellers. The lawsuit references that Amazon admitted to Congress that it entered an agreement with Apple that permits only “seven resellers of new Apple products” on its platform.
A former Apple employee has pled guilty to defrauding the company out of over $17 million. Dhirendra Prasad, who spent most of his decade at Apple working as a buyer in the Global Service Supply Chain department, admitted to “taking kickbacks, inflating invoices, stealing parts and causing Apple to pay for items and services never received,” according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. Prasad started these schemes in 2011 and continued them until 2018.
In one scam, Prasad shipped motherboards from Apple’s inventory to CTrends, a company run by a co-conspirator, Don M. Baker (who previously admitted to taking part in the fraudulent schemes). Baker harvested components from the motherboards, then Prasad organized purchase orders for those parts. After Baker shipped the components back to Apple, CTrends filed invoices for which Prasad arranged payment. In the end, the pair got Apple to pay for its own components and they split the proceeds of the scam.
In addition to fleecing Apple, Prasad confessed to engaging in tax fraud. He directed payments from Robert Gary Hansen (another co-conspirator who has admitted to taking part in the schemes) straight to his creditors. In addition, Prasad arranged for a shell company to send sham invoices to CTrends with the aim of covering up illicit payments Baker made to him. This enabled Baker “to claim hundreds of thousands of dollars of unjustified tax deductions,” the US Attorney’s Office said. All told, prosecutors claim that the scams resulted in the IRS losing over $1.8 million.
Prasad will be sentenced in March. He pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. Prasad also pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which has a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment. Moreover, Prasad agreed to forfeit around $5 million worth of assets he accrued as a result of his criminal actions, including real estate properties.
The world’s wealthiest people are responsible for about a million times more emissions than the world’s lowest earners when you take into account their investments, a new report has found. The report, issued Sunday by Oxfam, finds that the world’s 125 wealthiest people—including American billionaires Bill Gates, Jim Walton, Warren Buffett, and Elon Musk—have a combined carbon footprint roughly equivalent to that of the entire country of France.
There’s lots of academic work out there calculating how the personal carbon footprints of the ultra-wealthy differ from the average Joe, and the habits of the world’s superrich certainly jack up their personal emissions. But where billionaires put all that excess money may actually be more important than their private jets or expensive car collections. Past research has shown that financial investments from the world’s top 1% are largely responsible for the size of their overall emissions, rather than their personal lifestyles—between 50% and 70% of their emissions, the Oxfam report estimates. This new report takes into consideration the investments the world’s super rich make and how those investments can enable dirty industries and create even more emissions.
“Emissions from billionaire lifestyles – due to their frequent use of private jets and yachts – are thousands of times the average person, which is already completely unacceptable,” Nafkote Dabi, Climate Change Lead at Oxfam, said in a statement. “But if we look at emissions from their investments, then their carbon emissions are over a million times higher.”
To calculate powerful billionaires’ emissions, researchers at Oxfam first pulled together a list of the world’s wealthiest 220 people, then identified corporations that these people held investments in of at least a 10% equity stake. (Holding a 10% equity stake in a company, as defined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, makes a person a principal shareholder in that company and much more influential than a normal shareholder in the company’s overall decisions and direction.) Using data from financial services firm Exerica, Oxfam then also calculated the Scope 1 and 2 emissions—direct emissions from operations and indirect emissions from energy, heating, and cooling—of those corporations, and used each billionaire’s investment with these overall emissions to figure out how much they were responsible for.
There were some gaps in the analysis, thanks to a lack of transparency from some of the world’s wealthiest on their investments as well as a similar lack of transparency from corporations on their emissions. However, with the numbers they were able to work with, the Oxfam researchers were still able to figure out that each billionaire out of a final list of 125 was responsible for funding around 3.3 million tons (3 million tonnes) of CO2 emissions in average each year, thanks to their oversize investments in 183 global corporations. The average person in the UK has a pension that finances around 25.4 tons (23 tonnes) of CO2 emissions each year; the world’s poorest 10% of people, meanwhile, produce on average just 3 tons (2.76 tonnes) of CO2 each year.
There are some obvious flaws with this assessment. For one thing, the lack of transparency around emissions as well as missing public information on billionaire equity stakes in certain companies means that the numbers contained here are certainly low, and there’s some notable billionaires missing. (Jeff Bezos, for instance, is not on the final list; we have to wonder what the numbers on his emissions look like.) And someone who is in favor of green capitalism swooping in to save the planet could argue that someone like Gates or Musk’s carbon-intensive investments deserve context, given that their money has gone toward technological solutions to climate change. But the report does emphasize how runaway capitalism and the influence of a powerful and wealthy few can keep the world careening toward disaster, even as the rest of us are increasingly affected—and how relying on the rich and powerful to kick climate action into gear is a losing game.
“On October 8th, PayPal updated its terms of service agreement to include a clause enabling it to withdraw $2,500 from users’ bank accounts simply for posting anything the company deems as misinformation or offensive,” reports Grit Daily. “Unsurprisingly, the backlash was instant and massive,” causing the company to backtrack on the policy and claim the update was sent out “in error.” Now, after the criticism on social media died down, severalmediaoutlets are reporting that the company quietly reinstated the questionable misinformation fine — even though that itself may be a bit of misinformation. From a report: Apparently, they believed that everyone would just accept their claim and immediately forget about the incident. So the clause that was a mistake and was never intended to be included in PayPal’s terms of service magically ended up back in there once the criticism died back down. That sounds plausible, right? And as for what constitutes a “violation” of the company’s terms of service, the language is so vaguely worded that it could encompass literally anything.
The term “other forms of intolerance” is so broad that it legally gives the company grounds to claim that anyone not fully supporting any particular position is engaging in “intolerance” because the definition of the word is the unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behavior that differ from one’s own. So essentially, this clause gives PayPal the perceived right to withdraw $2,500 from users accounts for voicing opinions that PayPal disagrees with. As news of PayPal’s most recent revision spreads, I anticipate that the company’s PR disaster will grow, and with numerous competing payment platforms available today, this could deliver a devastating and well deserved blow to the company. UPDATE: According to The Deep Dive, citing Twitter user Kelley K, PayPal “never removed the $2,500 fine. It’s been there for over a year. All they removed earlier this month was a new section that mentioned misinformation.”
She goes on to highlight the following:
1.) [T]he $2,500 fine has been there since September 2021.
2.) PayPal did remove what was originally item number 5 of the Prohibited Activities annex, the portion that contained the questionable “promoting misinformation” clause that the company claims was an “error.”
3.) [T]he other portion, item 2.f. which includes “other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory,” which some have pointed out may also be dangerous as the language is vague, has always been there since the policy was updated, and not recently added.
India’s Competition Commission has announced it will fine Google ₹1,337.76 crore (₹13,377,600,000 or $161.5 million) for abusing its dominant position in multiple markets in the Android Mobile device ecosystem and ordered the company to open the Android ecosystem to competition
[…]
The Commission found Google was dominant in all five markets and worked to preserve that position with instruments such as the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement (MADA) that required Android licensees to include Google’s apps.
“MADA assured that the most prominent search entry points – i.e., search app, widget and Chrome browser – are pre-installed on Android devices, which accorded significant competitive edge to Google’s search services over its competitors,” the CIC found. Google’s policies also gave the company “significant competitive edge over its competitors” for its own apps such as YouTube on Android devices.
The CIC offered the following assessment of how Google’s actions impacted the market:
The competitors of these services could never avail the same level of market access which Google secured and embedded for itself through MADA. Network effects, coupled with status quo bias, create significant entry barriers for competitors of Google to enter or operate in the concerned markets.
[…]
For those and many other reasons, the CIC decided Google was on the wrong side of India’s Competition Act. In addition to the abovementioned fine, it imposed a cease and desist order on Google that requires it to change some of its business practices to do things such as:
Allowing third—party app stores to be sold on Google Play;
Allowing side-loading of apps;
Giving users choice of default search engine other than Google when setting up a device;
Ceasing payments to handset makers to secure search exclusivity;
Not denying access to Android APIs to developers who build apps that run on Android forks.
Some of the above are measures that other competition regulators around the world have contemplated, but not implemented.
So while India’s fine is a quarter of a day worth of Google’s $256 billion annual revenue and therefore a pin-prick, the tiny wound could become infected if other regulators decide to poke around.
Instead of a week of profits, mere days of net income for Cook
€1.1 billion fine levied against Apple by French authorities has been cut by two-thirds to just €372 million ($363 million) – an even more paltry sum for the world’s first company to surpass $3 trillion in market valuation.
The three-comma invoice was submitted to the iPhone giant in 2020 by France’s antitrust body, the Autorité de la Concurrence. Yesterday an appeals court reportedly tossed out the price-fixing charge in that legal spat as well as reducing the time scope of remaining charges and lowering the fine calculation rate.
The case goes back to 2012. Apple was accused of conspiring with Tech Data and Ingram Micro to fix the prices of some Apple devices (that’s the dropped charge) as well as abusing its power over resellers by limiting product supplies, thus pushing fans into Apple retail stores.
Tech Data and Ingram Micro were also fined, and have since had their totals reduced as well.
Both sides plan to appeal the decision, with Apple and the Autorité both telling Bloomberg they were unhappy with the outcome. In Apple’s case, it plans to file an appeal with France’s highest court to completely nullify the fine, a spokesperson said.
The Autorité, on the other hand, isn’t happy that the fine was reduced. “We would like to reaffirm our desire to guarantee the dissuasive nature of our penalties,” an Autorité spokesperson said, adding that desire especially applies to market players at the level of Apple.
Binance temporarily suspended fund transfers and other transactions on Thursday night after it discovered an exploit on its Smart Chain (BSC) blockchain network. Early reports said hackers stole cryptocurrency equivalent to more than $500 million, but Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao said that the company estimates the breach’s impact to be between $100 million and $110 million. A total of $7M had already been frozen.
The cryptocurrency exchange also assured users on Reddit that their funds are safe. As Zhao explained, an exploit on the BSC Token Hub cross-chain bridge, which enables the transfer of cryptocurrency and digital assets like NFTs from one blockchain to another, “resulted in extra BNB” or Binance Coin. That could mean the bad actors minted new BNBs and then moved an equivalent of around $100 million off the blockchain instead of stealing people’s actual funds. According to Bleeping Computer, the hacker quickly spread the stolen cryptocurrency in attempts of converting it to other assets, but it’s unclear if they had succeeded.
Zhao said the issue has been contained. The Smart Chain network has also started running again — with fixes to stop hackers from getting in — so users might be able to resume their transactions soon. Cross-chain bridge hacks have become a top security risk recently, and this incident is but one of many. Blockchain analyst firm Chainalysis reported back in August that an estimated total of $2 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen across 13 cross-chain bridge hacks. Approximately 69 percent of that amount had been stolen this year alone.
A federal judge in Texas has ordered the company to pay Voxer, the developer of app called Walkie Talkie, nearly $175 million as an ongoing royalty. Voxer accused Meta of infringing its patents and incorporating that tech in Instagram Live and Facebook Live.
In 2006, Tom Katis, the founder of Voxer, started working on a way to resolve communications problems he faced while serving in the US Army in Afghanistan, as TechCrunch notes. Katis and his team developed tech that allows for live voice and video transmissions, which led to Voxer debuting the Walkie Talkie app in 2011.
According to the lawsuit, soon after Voxer released the app, Meta (then known as Facebook) approached the company about a collaboration. Voxer is said to have revealed its proprietary technology as well as its patent portfolio to Meta, but the two sides didn’t reach an agreement. Voxer claims that even though Meta didn’t have live video or voice services back then, it identified the Walkie Talkie developer as a competitor and shut down access to Facebook features such as the “Find Friends” tool.
Meta debuted Facebook Live in 2015. Katis claims to have had a chance meeting with a Facebook Live product manager in early 2016 to discuss the alleged infringements of Voxer’s patents in that product, but Meta declined to reach a deal with the company. The latter released Instagram Live later that year. “Both products incorporate Voxer’s technologies and infringe its patents,” Voxer claimed in the lawsuit.
[…] In June, more than 3,300 employees across the United Kingdom began participating in a six-month experiment to test the efficacy of a four-day work week, which was organized by the nonprofit 4 Day Global. The pilot program has now reached its halfway point, and 4 Day Global is reporting overwhelmingly positive results. More specifically, 88% of surveyed participants said that the four-day work week is working well for their business.
[…]
Results also include 86% of survey respondents indicating that they would be likely or extremely likely to retain the four-day work week, while a total of 46% of respondents reported some increase in productivity. Businesses also reported a relatively smooth transition from the traditional five-day work week. On a scale of 1 being “extremely challenging” to 5 being “extremely smooth,” 4 Day Week Global found that 98% of respondents rated the transition to the four-day work week a 3 or higher.
Prior to the start of the experiment, 4 Day Week Global said that this is the biggest pilot program of its kind, where, as long as workers maintain 100% of their productivity, they will also maintain 100% of their salary while working 80% of the traditional work week. The nonprofit has been collaborating on the pilot program with labor think tank Autonomy as well as researchers from Cambridge University, Boston College, and Oxford University. Companies taking part in the experiment range from fish and chips shops, to PR firms, to tech companies.
[…]
“We are learning that for many it is a fairly smooth transition and for some there are some understandable hurdles – especially among those which have comparatively fixed or inflexible practices, systems, or cultures which date back well into the last century,” O’Connor said.
[…]
Microsoft flirted with a four-day work week in Japan and saw higher sales figures and levels of happiness in employees. The big hurdle moving forward will be getting buy in from enough companies and executives to make the four-day work week a permanent fixture in the world’s labor market—but results from large projects such as the one from 4 Day Week Global are only getting us closer to that end goal.
Stonk bros are mad at the doc for a few different reasons, but the two big things that keep coming up are the supposed lack of input from investors on r/SuperStonk and r/WallStreetBets and because of the final line of the trailer, spoken by journalist Taylor Lorenz. The trailer ends with her seemingly poking fun at the Redditors who set out to fight the GameStop short sellers, saying, “Yolo, let’s destroy the economy.” That line seems to have really angered a particular group of Reddit investors.
“I’m ready to cancel Netflix anyways…yolo lady gave me a reason. Slater Netflix,” said one user on r/SuperStonk. “Cancel Netflix and use that money to buy GME [stock]?” replied another. Of course, very few have shared images or other evidence proving that they have canceled their subscriptions, or that they even had one to begin with. And other users on r/SuperStonk expressed disbelief at the idea of people canceling a sub over a documentary that hadn’t even been released yet.
Still, over on Twitter, you can find tons of angry replies to Netflix’s trailer, with people claiming it’s just a hit job meant to make retail investors look terrible. Even Taylor Lorenz has come out and clarified that she is adamantly opposed to the broken and unfair economic system of Wall Street, calling it “undeniably unhealthy.” But that doesn’t matter to angry investors. I guess all you need is one soundbite from an unreleased movie’s trailer to know it’s a hit piece.
Just – wow, calling retail investors who caught and exposed a massive illegal short on Gamestop and then managed to actually do something about it Stonkbros is also a hit piece.
With Russia closing the gas pipelines to Europe as a catalyst and using the people of Finland as blackmail material the Finnish government is taking control of company payment structures and grabs 1% of any company that signs up to the possibility of taking a loan from the government at extortionate interest rates.
It’s pretty obvious it’s a safe loan that will be paid back, but the amounts are beyond normal banking facilities to provide.
Energy companies can simply not afford to not sign up for the possibility of the loan (even if they’re not sure they actually need the facility yet) because bankruptcy is not an option if you’re servicing heating for the population and energy for companies to operate on. It’s this need to care for people that the Finnish government – which is supposed to protect the population – is strong arming the energy sector to sign up for these bizarre conditions.
To be sure: the Finnish government take the 1% of the company and control payments whether a loan is taken out or not and even after repayment of the loan.
They have potentially valued the energy sector in Finland at EUR 0,-.
[…]
Minister of Finance Annika Saarikko (Centre) stated that the funding should not be misconstrued as financial aid or subsidy.
“It’s a loan,” she emphasised. “Companies must pay it back in two years’ time. And the government would only lose money in the extreme circumstance where the company ends up permanently insolvent. Even then, similarly to a regular loan, a share of the company’s collaterals – such as power plants or electricity production – corresponding to the [loan] value would end up in the state’s possession.”
The emergency funding scheme enables the government to grant loans and guarantees to companies with an electricity production capacity of more than 100 megawatts that have exhausted all other financing options, that are deemed critical for the functioning of the electricity market and that are at risk of insolvency due to soaring collateral requirements.
[…]
The financing will be available until the end of next year with a maximum repayment period of two years and with a total interest rate of 10 per cent for the first six months and one of 12 per cent for the rest of the repayment period, according to Helsingin Sanomat.
The borrower, in turn, will be prohibited from making dividend payouts or re-distributing their profits in other ways until the loan has been repaid. Offering bonuses, pay rises and other incentives to the management will similarly be prohibited between 2022 and 2023. The borrower must also invite the government to take up a one per cent stake through a free share issue or consent to a three-percentage-point increase in the interest rate.
“The loan terms are exceptionally strict,” confirmed Saarikko. “It’s a message from the government to companies that this is a last-resort form of assistance. You should first turn to your owners, such as municipalities in the public sector, and market-based financing solutions.”
The government introduced the emergency funding scheme due to the mounting collateral requirements faced by energy companies active in the electricity derivatives market. Collaterals can be demanded by customers as a form of guarantee of their future electricity supply as their value is equal to the difference of the price defined in the futures contract and current price.
Energy prices have soared in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Blood testing huckster and former Arrayit president Mark Schena has been convicted in a covid-19 and allergy test scheme that allegedly resulted in nearly $80 million worth of fraudulent claims. Schena, who was convicted on five separate charges, could potentially spend decades in prison, according to the Department of Justice
The DOJ alleges Schena misled investors with bogus claims of “revolutionary” new technology capable of testing for virtually any disease with just a couple of pinpricks of blood while president of his pharma startup. No, this isn’t Theranos but it yes, it sure does sound similar.
Schena allegedly misled investors and told them his company was valued at around $4.5 billion. In reality, the DOJ alleges the president withheld documents that revealed Arrayit was actually on the verge of bankruptcy. Arrayit allegedly released fabricated press releases and tweets falsely claiming major institutions had entered into partnerships with the company. Schena even boldly claimed he was on a “shortlist” for the Nobel Prize, a claim that also turned out to be bullshit.
[…]
All told, Arrayit allegedly filed $77 million worth of false and fraudulent claims for its covid-19 and allergy testing service. Schena, who was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two counts of health care fraud, one count of conspiracy to pay kickbacks, two counts of payment of kickbacks, and three counts of securities fraud, could potentially face decades in prison.
The move comes in response to growing pressure on app store operators to give developers options, as Epic Games sought in its dispute with Apple and the government of South Korea required with legislation. The EU’s Digital Markets Act also seeks to limit Big Tech’s gatekeeping powers and was designed to stop Google prioritizing its own goods and services over those of competitors.
The test, foreshadowed in March 2022 when Spotify’s Android app offered its own payment system alongside Google’s, will see the search giant offer developers the chance to offer users the chance to employ payment systems other than its own.
The trial covers digital content and services, such as in-app purchases and subscriptions. Web-based payments as an alternative payment method in an embedded webview within their app are also possible under the pilot.
The program is detailed in a support document that states it will run in European Economic Area (EEA) countries – not the UK – plus Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan.
[…]
The test will require alternative payment systems to be compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and developers must provide customer service for their chosen system. Payment systems used must provide a process to dispute unauthorized transactions.
Games are not eligible for the test, and Google’s not explained why other than to say they’re not eligible but that decision might change.
[…]
“Google Play’s service fee has never been simply a fee for payment processing. It reflects the value provided by Android and Play and supports our continued investments across Android and Google Play, allowing for the user and developer features that people count on.”
[…]
If you fancy trying the scheme, apply here – but don’t bother unless you already have a Play Store developer account, as that’s required to apply for inclusion
Firstly, good job for staying away from these. MSM did try hard to call them ‘mEmE StOcKs’. MSM tried even harder to push innocent investors like you and me into them. These pieces of illicit trash were, and still are, uninvestable. Remain clear of these pump and dumps, they’re junk. They are not meme stocks; they’ll never be.
Let’s take a look at where things are today:
Ticker
Book Value a week ago (in Billions of USD)
Book Value today (in Billions of USD)
HKD
477.00
39.23
AMTD
16.70
2.81
QRTEB
4.60
1.36
LTRPB
0.40
0.15
MEGL
4.91
0.25
Total:
504
43
Let’s remember that this criminal balloon was developed beginning July 15th during the GameStop split/dividend process that was defrauded by DTCC into a split. Also remember that Loop Capital, a GameStop short seller who is a stones throw away from Citadel in Chicago, underwrote the major one above.
These tickers, just last week, were able to be used as half a Trillion USDin collateral [for margin requirements] on the books. Now down 92% overnight to $43B, which is less than the margin alert received by Susquehanna.
Hackers recently stole $190 million from cryptocurrency cross-chain token platform Nomad, and now the company says it will pay a bounty to the thieves if they return those assets.
Nomad says it will pay the hackers an amount that is worth up to 10% of the stolen funds and call off its lawyers after the money is returned to an official “recovery wallet.” It will also consider the cyberthieves to be ethical — or “white hat” — hackers.
The initial theft happened earlier this week when Nomad’s routing systems were being upgraded, which allowed attackers to spoof messages and copy and paste transactions. Nomad’s bridge was zapped quickly in what one researcher called a ““frenzied free-for-all.”
The exploit is the seventh major incident to target a bridge in 2022, and it is the eighth largest cryptocurrency theft of all time, according to blockchain analysis firm Elliptic. Added together, over a dozen unique hacks have occurred in 2022, with more than $2 billion stolen from cross-chain bridges like Nomad.
Nomad’s willingness to work with the intruders
Elliptic said there were 40 hackers involved in the Nomad incident, and the company appears to want to make the return of its money as much of a win-win as possible.
For anyone to qualify for the bounty, the only caveats Nomad has is that the hackers have to return at least 90% of the total funds they hacked, use Ethereum as the currency, use Anchorage Digital (a nationally regulated custodian bank), and do it in a “timely” fashion. The company didn’t give a specific number of days or weeks as a deadline, but it said it will continue to work with its online community, blockchain analysis firms, and law enforcement to guarantee that all funds are returned.
At least one big bitcoin mining operation in Texas that was not actually mining much bitcoin during this season’s record-breaking heat netted millions of dollars in profits—more than they would have if they just kept on mining without any shutdowns. It’s thanks to power purchase agreements signed with the local grid, allowing them to sell electricity they purchased earlier back to the provider for a tidy sum.
Riot Blockchain itself announced it had made an estimated $9.5 million in power credits thanks to the multiple times it shut down its mining rigs. This was even more than the amount the company gained in selling bitcoin that month. The company’s page said it sold 275 bitcoin, with net proceeds equalling just $5.6 million. This is compared to last year when the company said it produced 444 bitcoin, worth approximately $16 million just before the price of BTC really spiked toward the tail end of 2021.
[…]
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas—AKA ERCOT—had asked businesses to routinely power down in order to conserve electricity throughout July. Riot and its massive 750-megawatt bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas reduced power multiple times during times of peak demand. Of course, many of the dozens of large-scale bitcoin mining operations also cut activity during the past month to not over-stress the often overtaxed grid, but Riot remains the largest token miner in the Lone Star State.
The amount of bitcoin produced during this past month was 318, 28% less than the same month last year. While the companies did publicly agree to shutdowns in order to preserve the grid, they were also avoiding scaling electricity prices during peak loads.
ERCOT provides power purchase agreements that are usually termed for one year, but Lee Bratcher, the president of the Texas Blockchain Council, told Gizmodo in a phone interview that only a handful of the biggest bitcoin miners actually have these PPAs. The ones that do, like Riot, can take advantage of the need to curtail power, while other miners simply have to make do.
The Texas Blockchain Council networks and promotes the many crypto mining operations in the state. Bratcher called these PPAs “a good deal” for ERCOT, since it can regain the power needed for the rest of its grid during peak times.
At the same time, the massive draw of these mining operations is only expected to increase. Texas’ grid system has said that Texas crypto miners will put a six gigawatt-demand on the grid by next year. Congressional Democrats have warned the seven largest mining rigs in the U.S. draw power equivalent to all the residential homes in the city of Houston. These crypto miners are only expected to get bigger over time.
HKD, a spinoff IPO with 51 employees within the space of a few days had a stock price explosion up to around $2555 per stock from around $75 starting on 28th July. No buy button was disabled (as was the case with Gamestop / $GME) and within a few days the rug was pulled on 3rd of August leading to a (current) value of around $1000. This is around the time of the very confusing $GME stock dividend split (splividend) which has caused chaos with brokers not issuing the split shares or dividend to clients with $GME stock. Redditors were caught completely flat footed by this, but the media has been blaming Reddit with headlines like the following
Redditors are affronted that this stock is being treated differently from $GME – a stock that was being short squeezed for no reason apart from monetary gains for huge institutional investors such as Ken Griffin and Citadel and many more.
TLDR: They took over an insurer in HK (Hong Kong) when China took over. They also bought up a couple insurers in Singapore. They may offer some fintech services and possibly a small media platform for some SE Asia internet celebs. Their “SpiderNet” is, according to them, their most profitable system. It appears to just be a business network that you have to pay to be a part of. It all sounds like a corporate crime syndicate straight out of a comic book.
They mention a “controlling shareholder” a few times, which I assume is AMTD Idea Group, a holding company. They’ve been investigated for some very fradulastic crap, which I will be writing up next. (https://hindenburgresearch.com/ebang/)
This stock just IPO’d, is based in a foreign country, and has run 30,000% in two weeks on very low volume. Translation: Please do not read this and conclude, “Wow, what a great stock that I should definitely buy!” — That is absolutely NOT what we’re saying here
the website’s explanation of SpiderNet is extremely vague.
What can be gleaned from the website is:
AMTD provides investment banking and asset management services to clients on an international basis
AMTD Digital raised $125M in its New York IPO — the largest listing by a Chinese company in 2022
It owns the SpiderNet platform
That’s really all the website explains. After digging through a few press releases, we were able to determine that the SpiderNet platform intends to provide capital and technology to digital startups, as well as provide networking services to other digital startups. In turn, SpiderNet collects a fee from its members, which is where it gets almost all of its revenue.
In short: AMTD Digital is a Hong Kong based fintech play which essentially provides loans and services to startups in exchange for fees.
