Showing posts with label News Update. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News Update. Show all posts

Oct 25, 2013

FBI seizes over $27 million in bitcoins, likely from Silk Road suspect

When we left off earlier this month, the FBI had acknowledged that 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 told Forbes that the agency has now also seized 144,000 bitcoins, worth over $27 million at current exchange rates.
The magazine reports:
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 confirm Forbes' report, Kelly J. Langmesser, a spokesperson for the FBI in New York, declined to comment.
Forbes also linked to a particular 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 just liquidate (read: sell) them, as with any other seized asset in a criminal case.

Oct 22, 2013

Facebook Reverses Stance — Again — On Violent Viral Video

Facebook_F380
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 had originally 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 expression against, 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 for banning some instances of women breastfeeding on its network, while allowing others. Facebook maintains its terms of service are 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.”

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Oct 8, 2013

Still have to write that thank-you note? Pay a robot to do it for you

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 by Bond, 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 a relatively recent area of research in 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.
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Report: Apple’s next, probably-iPad-focused event happens October 22

AllThingsD is rarely wrong about these things. 
by Andrew Cunningham



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" are telling AllThingsD that 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's September 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 us iOS 7 and a pair of new iPhones. The iMac was quietly refreshed with 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 recent Golden Master build of OSX 10.9 gives 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.
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Civ II’s “Eternal War” continues on reddit more than a year later

The 11-year conflict has spawned a community that's united 12,000 players. 
by Casey Johnston



How a redditor conquered a futuristic America with a Celtic army.

Fifteen months ago, the Internet, and more specifically, reddit, gave us The Eternal War. Reddit user Lycerius had been playing the same game of Civ II for 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 redditor put together a solution only 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/theeternalwarstories was 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 an Eternal War RPG set in the same universe.
Once a year had passed, Lycerius checked in with 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's 1984 featured war with a made-up foe, but in the ironically reality-bound Civ 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.
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Obamacare site hits reset button on passwords as contractors scramble

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

CGI has 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 the Federal 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.
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Hijacking of AV firms’ websites may be linked to hack on Network Solutions

DNS redirection caused companies to lose control of sites and e-mail traffic. 
by Dan Goodin




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 been reported to be struck by the same attackers, although that claim wasn't verified. All five websites rely on services from Network Solutions, which is owned by Web.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 also reported its website was hijacked through 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 the Leaseweb 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.
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Older Samsung phones banned from US as trade order goes into effect

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 order came out two 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 to Bloomberg 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 said that 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.
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MadCatz $250 M.O.J.O. aims to be the high-end Android miniconsole

Beefy internals match the beefy-for-the-space price. 
by Kyle Orland

Say what you will about Android-based microconsole efforts like Ouya and Gamestick, 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 for its previously announced M.O.J.O. microconsole at $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 can place your pre-order now; deliveries will begin on December 10.
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HTC One Max with fingerprint sensor coming next week

The design of an HTC One, size of a Note 3, and fingerprint sensor of an iPhone. 
by Ron Amadeo



HTC is reportedly nearly ready to announce the giant version of its flagship HTC One smartphone, the HTC One Max. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Taiwanese company will reveal the One Max on October 15th. Surprisingly, it will come with a fingerprint sensor, the Journal says.
Rumors and leaked photos peg the One Max as nearly identical in design to the One, just with a larger screen. The Max screen should come in at 5.9 inches—slightly bigger than the Galaxy Note 3. The rest of the rumored specs are pretty standard for a high-end phone: a 1080p screen, Snapdragon 800 processor, and 2GB of RAM.
If the previously leaked photos of the One Max are accurate, the fingerprint sensor will be on the back of the phone, just below the camera. This is in contrast to the iPhone 5S, which has a fingerprint reader integrated into the home button.
The Verge corroborates this report, saying it has received invites for HTC events on October 15th in Hong Kong and Taipei. We know the One Max should be headed at least to Verizon, as there have been "blurrycam" shots of the One Max with the HTC logo replaced by Verizon's. We should know a lot more about this phone in just one short week.
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Higgs theorists—including Higgs himself—get Nobel Prize in physics

Confirmation of particle's existence leads to award for work published in 1964. 
by John Timmer



A collision in the LHC's CMS detector.

Last year, after decades of waiting, a handful of theorists had their work confirmed with the announcement that scientists had discovered an elusive particle called the Higgs boson. Now, just over a year later, two of those theoreticians are being awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.
The Higgs boson is a manifestation of the Higgs field, an invisible entity that pervades the Universe. Interactions between the Higgs field and particles help provide particles with mass, with particles that interact more strongly having larger masses. But despite its central role in the function of the Universe, the road to the papers that predicted the existence of the Higgs was bumpy, as was the process of discovering it.
The idea of the Higgs was a consequence of studies on the weak force, which controls the decay of radioactive elements. The weak force only operates at very short distances, which suggests that the particles that mediate it (the W and Z bosons) are likely to be massive. While it was possible to use existing models of physics to explain some of their properties, these predictions had an awkward feature: just like another force-carrying particle, the photon, the resulting W and Z bosons were massless.
Over time, theoreticians managed to craft models that included massive W and Z bosons, but they invariably came with a hitch: a massless partner, which would imply a longer-range force. In 1964, however, a series of papers was published in rapid succession that described a way to get rid of this problematic particle. If a certain symmetry in the models was broken, the massless partner would go away, leaving only a massive one. The first of these papers, by François Englert and Robert Brout, proposed the new model in terms of quantum field theory; the second, by Peter Higgs, noted that a single quantum of the field would be detectable as a particle.
Robert Brout died in 2011, so Englert (currently at the Free University of Brussels) was honored for his contributions, as was Higgs, who is at the University of Edinburgh. The third paper, by Gerald Guralnik, Carl Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble, was not recognized by this award, possibly due to the prize's stipulation that only three people be recognized. (For the same reason, none of the people who spotted the Higgs at the LHC are recognized; as the Nobel documents point out, each of the two detectors credited with the discovery had a staff of over 3,000 researchers.)
But the third paper provided an independent validation of the general approach, as did a completely independent derivation by students in the Soviet Union. By 1967, Steve Weinberg had extended the Higgs mechanism to account for the mass of electrons and heavier leptons, and in 1971, Gerhard ‘t Hooft and Martinus Veltman figured out how to get rid of a few annoying infinities in some of the equations. By 1983, the W and Z bosons had had their masses determined, providing an experimental validation of some of the predictions made by the theoreticians.
But while the Higgs field managed to get a lot of things in the Standard Model to work properly, we still didn't have experimental validation of one of its predictions: the Higgs particle. Precision measurements of the masses of some of the heavier particles put an upper limit on the Higgs mass at about 150GeV, while experiments with the Large Electron-Positron collider (the LHC's predecessor, built in the same tunnel) eliminated everything under 115GeV. Meanwhile, years of running the Tevatron had produced a weak signal of around 120GeV, one that was just over two standard deviations above background noise.
That was where things stood when the LHC started up. Within a few years of operation, the new collider had generated enough data to detect a five-sigma signal at just above 125GeV, enough to announce discovery. On the day of the announcement, Englert and Higgs were in the audience at CERN. Now, they will have a chance to meet again with a different kind of audience—one with the King of Sweden.
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How the feds busted a top Silk Road seller

UK authorities also announce arrest of Silk Road sellers in Devon, Manchester. 
by Cyrus Farivar



900 suspected tablets of Alprazolam, aka Xanax, were sent to a suspected Silk Road seller in November 2012.

Authorities in the state of Washington arrested two people last week in connection with drug sales on the Silk Road, a clear indication of a crackdown on dealers using the notorious site. News of their arrest first broke late Monday evening.
According to a 16-page criminal complaint (PDF) dated October 2, 2013, the two suspects, Steven Lloyd Sadler and Jenna M. White, have been charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Authorities believe that Sadler and White, arrested on October 2 and 3 respectively, are behind the “NOD” account on Silk Road, which was one of the “top sellers” on the site. (That account also had a thread under the Silk Road subreddit.)

From Pakistan to Seattle

The criminal complaint describes how authorities intercepted various packages from the United States Postal Service “mail stream,” using a combination of drug-sniffing dogs and parcel searches in September 2012. A postal inspector found one package that “contained similar handwriting, was of the same size, and bore the same type of postage stamp, compared to the first package that the inspector had opened without a warrant.”
Law enforcement agents did not find drugs in that second package, but they did find $3,200 in cash and a return address pointing authorities to an address at a UPS store, where one “Edward Harlow” had opened an account, as had one “Aaron Thompson.” UPS also revealed to authorities that “Thompson” had opened another box in Tukwila, Washington, another Seattle suburb.
By November 2012, the USPS intercepted another package sent from Pakistan addressed to Thompson's Tukwila UPS box. When it was searched by customs authorities, agents found “900 suspected tablets of Alprazolam.” Alprazolam is the generic name of Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug.
The following month, a postal employee at the Riverton Heights Post Office, in SeaTac, Washington, just south of Seattle, noticed that a “blond female” was purchasing stamps and dropping off packages with handwriting similar to the ones found on the previously inspected packages. That same employee noted that the blonde woman drove an Audi and wrote down its license plate number. From there, it appears that it was all downhill for the suspects.
Law enforcement ran the plate for the Audi, which turned up the name of Steven Sadler and a Bellevue, Washington address for his condominium, with other records searches confirming it was his residence. Based on "surveillance by law enforcement on multiple occasions," White appeared to also reside at the Bellevue condo.

DVD case as drug mule

With a photo of Sadler from the driver’s license database in hand, authorities checked with employees at the UPS store who confirmed that “Aaron Thompson” was indeed Steven Sadler. They also identified a blonde female “picking up and dropping off packages, and that she described herself as Thompson’s girlfriend.”
By February 2013, the UPS store had received a package for Aaron Thompson again. With a search warrant, authorities opened the package and found a “Sports Illustrated DVD,” which also contained “nine grams of a substance that field tested positive for methamphetamine.” In March 2013, authorities intercepted another package bound for Alaska, again with the same handwriting. In striking a deal with the recipient on reduced state felony charges, the Alaska man said that he had purchased the drugs from “NOD” on the Silk Road.
By May 2013, postal inspectors received warrants to put tracking devices on the Audi and another car associated with the suspects, a BMW. Not surprisingly, the suspects’ vehicles were seen consistently traveling to various post offices in the greater Seattle region. Authorities also conducted a controlled purchase via a confidential informant’s account in June 2013 from the NOD account.
Sadler was arrested on October 2, and White turned herself in the following day.
The suspects' next court hearings are set in for October 15 and 17, respectively.

Across the pond

On Tuesday, British authorities announced that they had also arrested four men “hours after the FBI arrested the suspected creator of the Silk Road” last week. In partnership with US authorities, the National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested three men from Manchester and one from Devon who they believed were “significant users” of the Silk Road.
NCA Director General Keith Bristow said in a statement that his agency would remain vigilant in arresting and prosecuting more people involved in the notorious site, promising more arrests down the road. "These arrests send a clear message to criminals,” he said. “The hidden Internet isn't hidden and your anonymous activity isn't anonymous. We know where you are, what you are doing, and we will catch you.”
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