When we left off earlier this month, the FBI hadacknowledgedthat it seized over 26,000 bitcoins as part of its case against the Silk Road, the infamous Bitcoin- and Tor-fueled illicit marketplace.
But on Friday, an anonymous source at the FBI toldForbesthat the agency has now also seized 144,000 bitcoins, worth over $27 million atcurrent exchange rates.
The FBI official wouldn’t say how the agency had determined that the Bitcoin “wallet”–a collection of Bitcoins at a single address in the Bitcoin network–belonged to [suspect Ross Ulbricht], but that it was sure they were his. “This is his wallet,” said the FBI official. “We seized this from DPR,” the official added, referring to the pseudonym “the Dread Pirate Roberts,” which prosecutors say Ulbricht allegedly used while running the Silk Road.
When Ars called the FBI to confirmForbes' report, Kelly J. Langmesser, a spokesperson for the FBI in New York, declined to comment.
Forbesalso linked to aparticular Bitcoin address, which received a massive influx of bitcoins within the last 24 hours. And just like the last time the Internet identified one of the accounts believed to be controlled by the feds, there have been new small donations to that account, ostensibly so that the donors can send comments to the owner of the account. For now, those comments appear only to be advertisements rather than insults, along the lines of "Get cheap USB hubs and networking equipment to your door in 2 days. Bitcoin only of course" and "www.zeroblock.com: Real-time Bitcoin market data and aggregated news feed."
So what will government authorities do with all these seized bitcoins once the case is wrapped up? They'll mostly likely justliquidate(read: sell) them, as with any other seized asset in a criminal case.
Sometimes figuring out the fine line between free expression and overly objectionable content is harder than you’d think.
Just ask Facebook, which on Tuesday reversed a stance it took just 24 hours previously and removed from its network a violent video that had been circulating wildly. On Monday, the company hadoriginally defended the video’s posting, considering it a type of free expression from users who were condemning the violent acts.
The move comes after a series of back-and-forth decisions on whether or not the act of posting the video — which depicts the brutal decapitation of a woman — should be considered support for, or an expressionagainst, acts of violence. The video originally made headlines back in May upon first showing up on Facebook, and was immediately taken down following a series of complaints that viewers could suffer long-term psychological damage after watching the gruesome imagery.
The entire debacle speaks to a tension Facebook is currently in the midst of navigating. Like Twitter, Facebook wants to let users document events around the world, good or bad. The company wants to be seen as a place for free expression — a conduit for the masses to speak out against perceived injustices.
In leaving up the video, Facebook was making a statement, almost as if saying, “Yes, this is a terrible thing. But we support the right to display injustices on our network in order to fight against them.”
This particular video, it seems, wasn’t the right one on which to hang the company’s free expression flag. The extreme nature of the violence stirred up serious dissent among child protection and online safety groups, causing Facebook to double back on its original stance.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has had difficulty in navigating what is allowed on Facebook. The company took heat over the past few years forbanningsomeinstances of women breastfeedingon its network, while allowing others. Facebook maintainsits terms of serviceare similar to television and print media in this regard.
Tuesday’s takedown may appease some. But it remains to be seen how well Facebook will handle being the arbiter of exactly what constitutes objectionable content too extreme for its network in the future.
Below is the company’s statement in full, along with its position on future potentially objectionable content:
“People turn to Facebook to share their experiences and to raise awareness about issues important to them. Sometimes, those experiences and issues involve graphic content that is of public interest or concern, such as human rights abuses, acts of terrorism, and other violence. When people share this type of graphic content, it is often to condemn it. If it is being shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate violence, Facebook removes it.
As part of our effort to combat the glorification of violence on Facebook, we are strengthening the enforcement of our policies.
First, when we review content that is reported to us, we will take a more holistic look at the context surrounding a violent image or video, and will remove content that celebrates violence.
Second, we will consider whether the person posting the content is sharing it responsibly, such as accompanying the video or image with a warning and sharing it with an age-appropriate audience.
Based on these enhanced standards, we have re-examined recent reports of graphic content and have concluded that this content improperly and irresponsibly glorifies violence. For this reason, we have removed it.
Going forward, we ask that people who share graphic content for the purpose of condemning it do so in a responsible manner, carefully selecting their audience and warning them about the nature of the content so they can make an informed choice about it.”
Bond Gifts has hired a handwriting robot to create custom cards via an app. by Casey Johnston
The Bond Gifts writing robot.
A robot that can mimic human handwriting has been put to work creating notes you can send from your iPhone. The cards are generated byBond, an iOS app from a new luxury gift-giving company of the same name, and are mostly meant for corporate relations purposes. But for us, the main attraction is that Bond employs a handwriting robot.
Imitating human cursive is not as simple as printing a font. Back-of-the-envelope math suggests there’s a few hundred thousand ways that a four-letter word’s letters can connect to each other with ligatures—or not, as the case may be. The fluidity of movement required to apply human-like amounts of pressure at the right points and not create inkblots is still arelatively recent area of researchin robotics.
How letters connect varies between fonts and is particularly complex, and complex to imitate, for real handwriting.
A handwriting bot still occupies about the same usefulness territory as the current generation of 3D-printers; that is, the process is sufficiently finicky and cumbersome that the average person may have an easier time just writing out a note themselves. But for those too rushed to calligraph individual cards (and affluent enough to pay someone else to do it), the Bond handwriting bot is waiting.
For $5, the company will have the robot write up to a 255-character message on a gold-embossed card that will be sealed with wax and mailed to the intended recipient. It could serve as a slightly more expensive and less flexible replacement for iOS’ Cards app, which used to send a custom-printed card for $3 domestically but was discontinued last month.
Bond is currently iOS-only, but the company has plans to release an Android app and a Web interface as well.
The old iPad 4 will supposedly be replaced by something more in line with the design of the iPad mini.
Chris Foresman
"Sources familiar with the matter" aretelling AllThingsDthat Apple's next product announcement will be taking place on October 22 and that the event will likely focus on new iPads, the Mac Pro, and OS X 10.9 Mavericks. AllThingsD has a strong track record when it comes to Apple news (the publication correctly predicted the company'sSeptember 10 iPhone event), and the date would make sense given the iPad-focused announcements Apple made in October of 2012. If Apple's scheduling is the same as it normally is, look for official invitations to go out at some point next Tuesday.
Apple refreshed a good-sized chunk of its product line in September—its event on September 10 gave usiOS 7and apairofnew iPhones. The iMac was quietly refreshedwith new Haswell CPUs a couple of weeks later. That said, much of Apple's lineup is still due for some sprucing up. The larger iPad is expected to get a physical redesign to bring it more in line with the iPad mini, and the mini may (or may not) be getting a Retina display to go with the expected internal upgrades. Both Retina MacBook Pros and the new Mac Pro that Apple first teased back in June are also due for a release date, and all of these product lines are sufficiently high-profile that we could see them sharing stage time with the iPads at the event (the Mac mini is also due for a Haswell refresh, but don't expect Apple to dwell much on its smallest, cheapest Mac). Both the redesigned 2012 iMac and the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro were unveiled at last year's October event, and the recentGolden Master build of OSX 10.9gives Apple even more reason to talk up its Macs.
Analysts are also looking for an all-new (perhaps watch-shaped) product line, but if it's coming, Apple's notoriously sieve-like supply chain has yet to give us any indication. We would expect an event that focuses primarily on the iPads and on Apple's professional Macs at this point. Whatever is announced, we'll be covering the events as they happen, and we'll be giving the review treatment to any new hardware and software that Apple sees fit to release.
Fifteen months ago, the Internet, and more specifically, reddit, gave usThe Eternal War. Reddit user Lycerius had been playing the same game ofCiv IIfor ten years, and he’d been fighting the same nuclear war for 1700 in-game years. But even after the puzzle was solved, Lycerius kept fighting.
When Lycerius originally posted about the game, it spawned its own subreddit,r/TheEternalWar, with an audience of thousands of redditors trying to solve Lycerius’ frustrating and seemingly impassable military conflict with their own approach. One redditorput together a solutiononly days after the original post, advising the construction of an army of Howitzers that would first take out the Vikings and then the Americans (once their alliance with the player dissolved).
Lycerius acknowledged the solution, but also decided to continue playing the game on his own time. As he played on, the subreddit spawned new pursuits:r/theeternalwarstorieswas an early venture where players wrote fiction in the universe of the war’s constant nuclear holocaust. Later, readers banded together to try to make anEternal War RPGset in the same universe.
Once a year had passed, Lyceriuschecked inwith his game’s progress. Having seen how other redditors were able to effect peace, he wanted to explore the opportunities of yet more war. Thus, after 11 years of on-and-off play (and 1900 years in the game), Lycerius’s Celts are still embroiled in war.
“Rather than destroy the Vikings, my largest operation of the 41st century was a massive naval and land offensive to capture the new Viking capital of Piza,” he wrote, hoping to instigate a Viking civil war. He keeps the war going to see if there's a case to be made for an Orwellian communist government; a regime that can survive in a perpetual state of war (True, Orwell's1984 featured war with a made-up foe, but in the ironically reality-boundCiv II, there’s no option to construct imaginary enemies).
Instead of descending into civil war, though, the Vikings ended up rebelling against him. In fact, Lycerius’ attempt at putting up with more war for its own sake eventually resulted in his own culture staging a number of uprisings and rebellions.
Lycerius promises to check back into the subreddit, which just barely misses the cut for the top thousand subreddits (above r/HalfLife but below r/BeardPorn), by the end of the year. In the meantime, parties still interested in taking up the helm can fight on.
Three years wasn't enough time to get this massive IT effort past the finish line. by Sean Gallagher
Getting to this page on the Healthcare.gov site is just the start of the battle for would-be insurance customers.
Sean Gallagher
Amid all the attention, bugs, and work happening at Healthcare.gov in light of the Affordable Care Act, potential registrants talking to phone support today have been told that all user passwords are being reset to help address the site's login woes. And the tech supports behind Healthcare.gov will be asking more users to act in the name of fixing the site, too. According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site's database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo.
The website for the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") launched just last week. With all the scrutiny and debate happening, if ever there was a website launch that was "too big to fail," this was it. So, of course, it did—depending on how you define "failure." The inability of Obamacare portals to keep up with the traffic demands initially put upon them has been seized by politicians and conservative pundits as evidence that Obamacare "is not ready for prime time" in the words of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Now, a week later, the site appears to be stabilizing, with waiting times dropping dramatically for those who haven't been able to register before.
A test of the site this morning had me waiting four minutes to get to the signup page; others got on instantly. But problems persist beyond the front door. The contractors responsible for the exchange—CGI Federal for the website itself, Quality Software Systems Inc. (QSSI) for the information "hub" that determines eligibility for programs and provides the data on qualified insurance plans, and Booz Allen for enrollment and eligibility technical support—are scrambling to deploy more fixes. Technical support call center operators continue to handle an onslaught of calls from users who can't get back into the system after registering.
In addition to would-be Healthcare.gov registrants notifying Ars about the password reset and login limbos, Ars learned that changes made to profiles already within the system may not be saved either—a problem that is only indicated by a very non-descriptive error message.
Ars attempted to contact the contractors with Healthcare.gov but did not receive a response as of this writing.
Healthcare.gov's profile page, where you provide your personal data, may not save changes you make...
But the only hint you'll get about it is this error pop-up.
Three years is not enough
CGIhas had some experience with these exchanges in the past. It built the Web portal for Massachusetts' "Romneycare" and is building exchanges for a number of other states. So with that experience behind them, why, with three years to prepare, did these sites have such a rough first week?
Those familiar with how Federal IT projects usually roll will suggest an alternative question: with three years to prepare a system that is expected to cost $683.81 million—and much of that preparation being bureaucratic haggling over the rules for its operation—how did the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and CGI manage to get anything up at all?
Federal IT projects are infamous for blowing out the "iron triangle" of project management—cost, scope, and schedule. Healthcare.gov hits all three sides of the triangle. Because of the legislative mandate for Healthcare.gov and its state-run cohorts, the project was handed a massive scope. With Congress eager to cut its throat, the program has been highly budget-sensitive. And with a hard deadline of October 1 and a heavy up-front regulatory process required to create the specifications for the portal, three years was a very tight deadline.
Based on theFederal IT Dashboard, which tracks the project status and risk for most of the federal government's major IT programs, it would appear that HHS and the Obama Administration were relatively confident that the exchange sites would launch on time. However, they were less confident about it coming in under budget. Known as the "CMS CCIIO Healthcare Insurance Exchange IT Investment," the program was assigned a "medium risk" evaluation (A "3" on a scale of 5) at the end of July. That rating wasn't because there was concern about the schedule. Instead, the risk rating was assigned because HHS' Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman was concerned about potential cost overruns for the website implementation.
There were even earlier causes for concern. Back in March, concerns about the funding levels for the program prompted Baitman and HHS management to rate the program as "high risk"—giving it a score of 1 out of 5. In June, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan auditing body that provides oversight reports to Congress, said that it was still a crapshoot as to whether the system would work on time. This uncertainty persisted because the hub being built by QSSI still hadn't been completely tested (the hub is responsible for making automated decisions about eligibility). While the policies to govern how the hub works—and how various state systems were supposed to work—had been completed, there was still a lot of code to be written to make those policies into an actual system.
All of that pushed the development of the system closer and closer to the deadline.As one reddit user posted when the site ran into trouble on October 1, "My wife works on this project but not as a developer. Last night she said, 'I have no idea how the site is going to go live tomorrow.'"
Garbage in, garbage out
The result of the headlong rush to October 1 was a system that had never been tested at anything like the load it experienced on its first day of operation (if it was tested with loads at all). Those looking for a reason for the site's horrible performance on its first day had plenty of things to choose from.
First of all, there's the front-end site itself. The first page of the registration process (once you get to it) has 2,099 lines of HTML code, but it also calls 56 JavaScript files and 11 CSS files. That's not exactly optimal for heavy-load pages.
Navigating the site once you get past registration is something of a cheese chase through the rat-maze. "It's like a bad, boring video game where you try to grunt and hack your way through to the next step," one site user told Ars.
Once you get through all that, it’s not clear that it's going to do you any good. Underlying problems in the back-end code—including the data hub built by QSSI—have been causing errors in determining whether individuals are eligible for subsidized plans under the program. In DC, that means health care plan prices won't be available to people registering through DC's portal until November. It may also mean that others who have registered already at the federal and state exchanges may get sticker shock later.
At least three high-profile websites that receive services from Network Solutions have been hijacked in recent days in attacks that are prompting speculation that the compromises are the result of a security lapse inside the popular domain registrar and Web host.
Competing antivirus providers Avira and AVG are confirmed to have been hit, as was messaging software developer Whatsapp. Alexa and Redtube have also beenreported to be struck by the same attackers, although that claim wasn't verified. All five websites rely on services fromNetwork Solutions, which is owned byWeb.com. At least some of the victims report losing control of the domain name system (DNS) servers used to route Internet traffic, a lapse that made it possible for hackers to redirect e-mail and Web traffic to malicious servers.
"It appears that our account used to manage DNS records registered at Network Solutions has received a fake password-reset request which was honored by the provider," Avira officials wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "Using the new credentials, the cybercriminals have been able to change the entries to point to their DNS servers."
Johannes Ullrich, CTO of the SANS Technology Institute, said he saw a screenshot confirming that AVG's site was similarly redirected and that Whatsapp was "apparently a third victim of this attack." Other sources also reported that Whatsapp was hijacked. By taking control of the name server (NS) records, the attackers were able to redirect people trying to visit those sites to a server that displayed pro-Palestinian propaganda. The hijacking has the potential to be much more serious than a mere defacement prank, since it can affect the servers that receive e-mail and interact with software customers.
"Once an attacker has control of the NS records, they may also change MX [mail exchange] records and redirect e-mail, or, in the case of an antivirus company like Avira, change the addresses used to download signature updates," Ullrich wrote. Many software applications rely on cryptographic signatures to certify a server is valid before accepting updates, so it's possible such an attack wasn't possible on Avira or AVG. Even with such protections in place, however, the ability of hackers to impersonate any of a company's servers is always a risk to end users.
Officials at Web.com didn't respond to a phone message asking if they are aware of the attacks and the report from Avira that the breach it experienced originated with Network Solutions' password reset function. This post will be updated if representatives reply later.
On Sunday, hosting firm Leaseweb alsoreported its website was hijackedthrough DNS redirection. During the compromise, some people trying to visit leaseweb.com were directed to a non-Leaseweb server. E-mails sent to leaseweb.com addresses were also not received by the proper machine. Internet records showed theLeaseweb registrar isn't Network Solutions. Beyond its use of DNS redirection, it's unclear if the Leaseweb compromise had any relation to the other hijackings.
Samsung won't get a last-minute reprieve from Obama like Apple did. by Joe Mullin
Samsung will be barred from importing some of its older phones thanks to a limited exclusion order that Apple won at the International Trade Commission. The exclusion ordercame outtwo months ago and kicks in today. The Korean company's last hope was a veto of the order by President Barack Obama, who recently issued a similar veto to protect Apple from an exclusion order.
The news is part of a broad array of patent battles that continue between Apple and Samsung. In this case at the ITC, Samsung products were found to infringe two Apple patents, one related to multitouch technology and another on headphone-jack sensors.
In allowing the exclusion order to go forward, US Trade Representative Michael Froman noted that Samsung's newer-model phones had worked around the patents at issue, meaning that the effect of an import ban will be sharply limited.
"The order expressly states that these devices and any other Samsung electronic media devices incorporating the approved design-around technologies are not covered," Froman said in a statement provided toBloomberg News. "Thus, I do not believe that concerns with regard to enforcement related to the scope of the order, in this case, provide a policy basis for disapproving it."
There are big differences between the two dueling ITC cases—in particular, Samsung was attacking Apple with standard-essential patents, whereas Apple was using patents on specific non-standard-based features. Despite that, the fact that the Obama administration was willing to intervene in the Apple-Samsung battles in favor of the US company may smack of favoritism to some.
The exclusion order shows that two of the older Samsung phones affected in this case are the Transform SPH-M920 and the Continuum SCH-1400. The Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 7.0 were also in the case but were found not to infringe the headphone patent. The effect on Samsung's bottom line of excluding those two phones will be de minimis. But Apple has proven it can and will go to great lengths to force its competitors to eliminate popular features from their phones.
Even though only a few phones were affected, Samsung argued vociferously against an import ban. It saidthat ITC exclusions are overly broad and threaten legitimate trade.
Despite the earlier information available about the Transform and Continuum, it isn't clear from the information available this morning exactly what Samsung phones will be banned and which ones have acceptable design-arounds. The ITC website is closed down due to the US government shutdown, and no documents or case information can be retrieved from it. The US Trade Representative's website is operating but has not been updated since October 1.
Beefy internals match the beefy-for-the-space price. by Kyle Orland
Say what you will about Android-based microconsole efforts likeOuyaandGamestick, but the $100 devices hold a distinct price advantage over more powerful consoles from the bigger manufacturers. Gaming peripheral maker MadCatz is giving up a lot of that pricing advantage by launching pre-orders forits previously announced M.O.J.O. microconsoleat $250 today.
That price reflects the beefy-for-an-Android-console specs inside the box. The M.O.J.O. upgrades the Nvidia Tegra 3 in the Ouya to a Tegra 4 processor and offers 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. That should help future-proof the console a bit, giving it a fighting chance to run high-end Android games that come out in the next year or two.
The bulk of mobile games today don't need nearly that much power, however, and even in the future a large proportion of Android-based titles are likely going to be casual fare that doesn't require anything close to high-end hardware. The $250 price point also pits the M.O.J.O. directly against full-fledged consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3. Those systems are at the end of their lifespans, sure, but they still sport better hardware and much better existing software lineups than MadCatz's Android effort. They are also likely to continue getting software support for a few more years.
It's hard to see what market segment MadCatz is specifically targeting with its pricey, powerful Android console, but if you're part of that market, you canplace your pre-order now; deliveries will begin on December 10.
