Police in Dallas used a robot with an explosive device to kill a suspect involved in a coordinated ambush against officers.
The suspect was holed up inside the El Centro College parking garage for several hours overnight Thursday before police moved to "blast him out," Mayor Mike Rawlings said Friday morning. The negotiations with the suspect had stalled.
Something very strange is going on with a pair of Hellfire air-to-ground training missiles. Loaded onto a civilian airliner in Beirut, Lebanon, their paperwork said the final destination was Portland, Oregon. But before they could get there, the plane stopped in Belgrade, Serbia, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear right now, where Serbian police and canines sniffed them out. So what the heck is going on here?
Gary L. Alford was running on adrenaline when he arrived for work on a Monday in June 2013, at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A tax investigator, he had spent much of the weekend in the living room of his New Jersey townhouse, scrolling through arcane chat rooms and old blog posts, reading on well after his fiancĂ©e had gone to sleep.The work had given Mr. Alford what he believed was the answer to a mystery that had confounded investigators for nearly two years: the identity of the mastermind behind the online drug bazaar known as Silk Road — a criminal known only by his screen name, Dread Pirate Roberts.When Mr. Alford showed up for work that Monday, he had a real name and a location. He assumed the news would be greeted with excitement. Instead, he says, he got the brushoff.He recalls asking the prosecutor on the case, out of frustration, “What about what I said is not compelling?”
Federal prosecutors in New York say a top aide to the Silk Road drug website's founder has been arrested in Thailand.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara (buh-RAH'-ruh) says 54-year-old Canadian citizen Robert Thomas Clark awaits extradition to the U.S.
IRS Special Agent Gary Alford writes in a complaint unsealed Friday that Clark helped sell heroin, cocaine and other drugs online between January 2011 and October 2013.
Mark Karpeles, the head of the collapsed MtGox Bitcoin exchange who was arrested in Tokyo, is facing fresh allegations that he misused $8.9 million in customers' deposits, Japanese media reported Sunday.
French-born Karpeles, 30, was arrested on Saturday after a series of fraud allegations led to the Tokyo-based exchange's spectacular collapse last year and hammered the digital currency's reputation.
Karpeles is suspected of manipulating data on the exchange's computer system in 2013 to artificially create about $1.0 million in Bitcoins, while police were also investigating his possible involvement in a massive loss of the virtual currency in 2014.
He was sent to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors' Office Sunday morning for further questioning, public broadcaster NHK said.
Police now suspect that he illegally spent customer deposits worth about 1.1 billion yen ($8.9 million), according to NHK and the best-selling Yomiuri newspaper.
He is suspected of misusing the funds privately and sending them to his other firms, the news reports said.
Japanese police on Saturday arrested Mark Karpeles, CEO of the collapsed MtGox bitcoin exchange, over the loss of nearly $390 million worth of the virtual currency, local media said.
Karpeles, 30, is suspected of having accessed the computer system of the exchange and falsifying data on its outstanding balance, Kyodo News and public broadcaster NHK said.
The global virtual currency community was shaken by the shuttering of MtGox, which froze withdrawals in February 2014 because of what the firm said was a bug in the software underpinning Bitcoin that allowed hackers to pilfer them.
The exchange filed for bankruptcy protection soon after, admitting it had lost 850,000 coins worth 48 billion yen ($387 million) at the time.
Spy agencies are caught in a "technology arms race" with terrorists and criminals, the new head of Britain's MI6 said on Monday in his first public comments since becoming chief.
Alex Younger defended the use of data by the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, after the release of documents by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden sparked criticism of sweeping mass surveillance by intelligence agencies.
"Using data appropriately and proportionately offers us a priceless opportunity to be even more deliberate and targeted in what we do, and so to be better at protecting our agents and this country," Younger said.
"The bad news is the same technology in opposition hands, an opposition often unconstrained by consideration of ethics and law, allows them to see what we are doing and to put our people and agents at risk," he said.
"So we find ourselves in a technology arms race."
The federal government became owners of one of the biggest troves of Bitcoin, thanks to seizing millions of dollars in the digital currency from criminals associated with the online black market Silk Road.
Two federal agents who helped lead one of several investigations in the case allegedly decided they wanted some of the money for themselves, according to a new federal court documents.
The two now-former agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Secret Service are charged with wire fraud, money laundering and other offenses for allegedly stealing Bitcoin during the federal investigation of Silk Road, an underground illicit black market federal prosecutors shut down in 2013.
If you’re looking for a way to gauge how the 3D printing market will evolve, look no further than the dawn of two other revolutionizing technologies – the desktop printing market and the VHS standard. And be prepared for a decidedly off-color story.
While many of us have fond memories of watching a favorite movie when it first came out on VHS, or admiring the first three-color party invitation we printed on a laser printer, the fact remains that innocent pursuits were not the sole reason either of these technologies took off. And we shouldn’t expect 3D printing to be any different.
The reality is that in both cases, the illegal, illicit, and otherwise unwholesome played a major role in the growth of both the VHS and desktop printing markets. While it’s clear that most applications of these technologies were G-rated, there were plenty that weren’t. And when it comes to 3D printing, that unwholesome and downright illegal activity called counterfeiting is likely to become one of the major reasons why 3D printing will be a major growth industry in the coming years.
To be sure, as with all technologies, from the Paleolithic stone ax to 20th century nuclear fission, there are applications for good that hopefully outweigh the not-so-good. And 3D printing will have its fair share: from the manufacture of prosthetics and spare parts to on-demand organs, foods, and your child’s next toy, the 3D printing revolution will by and large have a positive impact on society as a whole.
But the threat of a major surge in counterfeiting based on the availability of relatively cheap 3D printers, increasingly sophisticated printing materials, and a never-ending supply of CAD designs available on the Internet will fuel an enormous black market in counterfeit parts. And the potential impact of 3D printers for counterfeiting just keeps on growing: A recent report by Gartner Group speculates that intellectual property loss due to 3D printer counterfeiting could total $100 billion by 2018.
A drone packed with methamphetamine crashed into a parking lot in Mexico close to the California border, according to Tijuana Public Safety Secretariat.
The incident happened about 10 p.m. Tuesday, when the unmanned aircraft, which was carrying more than 6 pounds of meth, came down in the parking lot of a supermarket in Zona Rio, near the San Ysidro Port of Entry, according to authorities. The aircraft may have crashed because it was overloaded, officials said.
The drone was identified as a Spreading Wings S900 model, which had six propellers, authorities said. The incident was under investigation.
This is not the first time a drone has been used in an attempts to smuggle drugs over the border, authorities said.
The federal government on Thursday announced its first bitcoin securities fraud case, accusing a Texas man of engineering a Ponzi scheme by getting people to turn over their bitcoins in return for promises of high interest rates and the ability to recoup their investment at any time.
Trendon Shavers, of McKinney, awaited an initial court appearance in Texas on securities fraud and wire fraud charges that were outlined in a criminal complaint unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
"This case, the first of its kind, should serve as a warning to those looking to make a quick buck with unsecured currency," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a news release.
Bharara said the 32-year-old Shavers combined financial fraud and cyberfraud into a bitcoin Ponzi scheme offering "absurdly high interest payments, and ultimately cheated his investors out of their bitcoin investments."
At the peak of the scheme, Shavers possessed about 7 percent of all bitcoin in public circulation, prosecutors said.
A full-blown dark web drug crackdown is in the works, and it’s not stopping with the Silk Road.
On Thursday the FBI along with other law enforcement agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and Europol announced that it had seized the Silk Road 2, perhaps the most well-known drug market to appear on the Dark Web since the takedown of the original Silk Road last year. What it didn’t announce is that at least two other drug market sites have also been busted, and more takedowns are likely coming. The drug markets Hydra and Cloud 9 now both display the same “This Hidden Site Has Been Seized” notices as the Silk Road 2, emblazoned with the logos of the FBI and Europol. Several other popular dark net markets were down Thursday morning, as well, though they didn’t display that banner. An FBI spokesperson tells WIRED that there will be more than three market seizures in total, with the full extent of the operation set to be revealed by Friday.
For the last two years the crypto currency scene had exploded in size as people began learning about and participating in Bitcoin and its alternate currencies. Altcoins as people call them are smaller projects that can be mined and often traded directly for Bitcoin by miners who can not afford to mine Bitcoin directly. With this uprising of alternate currencies came the rise of many Exchanges; sites that provided a platform and medium for supporters, miners and traders of these projects to buy/sell/trade these currencies.
One of these altcoin exchanges was CryptoRush.in; a site dedicated to providing a fast paced medium for users to trade brand new crypto currencies which were traded at exchanges sometimes less than an hour after they were released. Unfortunately CryptoRush suffered a series of break-ins that crushed many members of the community but also provided an opportunity for us at BITCOMSEC to research, analyse evidence and track down the perpetrators. This article details over 7 months of logs, evidence and research that we have looked at to pinpoint exactly what happened at CryptoRush, its owners and who did walk away with all that money...
When the recording industry smashed Napster with a $20 billion lawsuit more than a decade ago, filesharing morphed into Bittorrent, a fully peer-to-peer system with no central server for law enforcement to attack. Now the developers behind one software project are trying to pull off a similar trick with the anarchic model of bitcoin e-commerce pioneered by the billion-dollar Silk Road black market. And just as with Bittorrent, their new system may be so decentralized that not even its creators can control exactly how it will be used.
This weekend, the developers behind OpenBazaar plan to release a beta version of the software designed to let anyone privately and directly buy and sell goods online with no intermediary. They describe it as “pseudonymous, uncensored trade.” Rather than hosting its commerce on any server, OpenBazaar installs on users’ PCs, and allows them to list products in a file stored in a so-called “distributed hash table,” a database spread across many users’ machines. Everything will be paid in bitcoin. The result of that peer-to-peer architecture, they hope, will be a marketplace that no one—–no government, no company, not even the OpenBazaar programmers—can regulate or shut down.
“We’re just really passionate about allowing peer-to-peer trade to happen online. We want that to exist,” says Sam Patterson, the operations lead for the non-profit project. “The internet allowed you to communicate directly. Bitcoin allowed you to send money directly. Now you can trade directly.”
And just what will you trade on OpenBazaar? A good first guess might be drugs. The multi-headed marketplace, after all, is designed to thwart law enforcement seizures or takedowns that arrest any one person or group. And though it doesn’t currently offer much anonymity by default, Patterson says its initial version can be used through a VPN to hide users’ IP addresses, and it will soon integrate the anonymity software Tor or I2P.
In fact, OpenBazaar was first launched in April as a spinoff of another open-source prototype called DarkMarket. That project’s anarchist creator, Amir Taaki, says he was inspired by the FBI’s takedown of the Silk Road and designed DarkMarket to “equip the people with the tools needed for the next generation of digital black markets.”
But Patterson and OpenBazaar founder Brian Hoffman adamantly insist OpenBazaar isn’t designed for selling narcotics, guns, or other contraband. They see their invention as a freer, more democratic eBay or Craigslist, with no seller fees and no one to arbitrarily change the rules or censor products. “We’re not the ‘Super Silk Road.’ We’re trying to replace eBay in a better form,” says Patterson. “We recognize that people may choose to use that technology in a way we see as distasteful, immoral, and illegal, but we’re giving them the option to engage in a kind of human interaction that doesn’t exist right now.”
Driverless cars, such as those being developed by Google, could be lethal weapons, the FBI has reportedly warned.
An internal report, obtained by the Guardian, said the vehicles could be "game changing" for law enforcement.
The report noted criminals using automated cars would have both hands free and be able to take their eyes off the road during a car chase.
But it said that driverless vehicles could help the emergency services by automatically clearing a path for them.
In the report, which was marked restricted and obtained under a public records request, the FBI predicted the vehicles "will have a high impact on transforming what both law enforcement and its adversaries can operationally do with a car".
French police said Monday they had smashed an illegal Bitcoin trading network, seizing virtual currency worth 200,000 euros ($272,000) in the first such operation in Europe.
Two people have been charged and are in custody following raids last week in the French southern cities of Nice, Cannes and Toulouse and in Brussels that led to the seizure of 388 Bitcoins.
"This is the first time that an illegal exchange platform for Bitcoins like this one has been dismantled in Europe," a police statement said.
The two men charged are a 27-year-old Tunisian who ran the website trading in Bitcoins and his suspected accomplice, a 36-year-old Frenchman.
Virtual currencies, most famously Bitcoin, have come under increasing scrutiny by financial regulators as their popularity has grown.
Launched in 2009 by a mysterious computer guru, Bitcoin is a form of cryptography-based e-money that offers a largely anonymous payment system.
Backers say virtual currencies allow for an efficient and anonymous way to store and transfer funds online.
But regulators argue the lack of legal framework governing the currency, the opaque way it is traded and its volatility make it dangerous.
In France, platforms that exchange Bitcoins and euros have to be approved by the ACPR, the bank and insurance supervisory body.
The Bitcoin world has been waiting for more than six months to see where the millions in cryptocash seized from the Silk Road black market for drugs would end up. Now that fortune is about to be sold off, like so many mafiosos’ cars or drug dealers’ bling, to the highest bidder.link.
On Thursday the U.S. Marshals’ office announced that it will be selling nearly 30,000 in bitcoins that were taken from a Silk Road server after the drug-selling site’s seizure last October, worth about $17.5 million at current exchange rates. But instead of liquidating the coins through an exchange, they’re going to be sold in ten blocks of about 3,000 bitcoins each via an email-based auction held on the Marshals’ service website. The coins officially go on the block in two weeks, and buyers will have 12 hours to put in their bids.
In fact, the 29,656.5 coins up for sale are a small fraction of the total seized bitcoin hoard from the Silk Road case. It also has another 144,342 coins whose fate is still in limbo. That larger fortune, currently worth over $83.6 million, was seized from Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old alleged to have run the Silk Road under the handle the Dread Pirate Roberts. In a court motion last December, Ulbricht confirmed that the coins were his but contested the government’s seizure of them, demanding their return.
The government’s bitcoin bake sale could potentially play havoc with the cryptocurrency’s economy. The current auction represents around only a quarter of a percent of the total number of bitcoins in circulation. But the still-contested 144,000 coins represent close to 1.1 percent. If that larger pot of coins is sold off in the same auction style, it could potentially flood the market with cheap coins and lower their price. In the hour following the Marshals’ news, the price of bitcoin fell about 2 percent.
But Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, argues that the sale could be good for bitcoin: As he sees it, even the Department of Justice now participates in the bitcoin economy. “The fact that they’re going to liquidate them instead of destroy them gives bitcoin some legitimacy,” he said in an interview about the potential sale of the coins last year. “They see them as something of value.”
Government regulators around the world have spent the last year scrambling to prevent bitcoin from becoming the currency of choice for money launderers and black marketeers. Now their worst fears may be about to materialize in a single piece of software.
On Thursday, a collective of politically radical coders that calls itself unSystem plans to release the first version of Dark Wallet: a bitcoin application designed to protect its users’ identities far more strongly than the partial privacy protections bitcoin offers in its current form. If the program works as promised, it could neuter impending bitcoin regulations that seek to tie individuals’ identities to bitcoin ownership. By encrypting and mixing together its users’ payments, Dark Wallet seeks to enable practically untraceable flows of money online that add new fuel to the Web’s burgeoning black markets.
“This is a way of using bitcoin that mocks every attempt to sprinkle it with regulation,” says Cody Wilson, one of Dark Wallet’s two 26-year-old organizers. “It’s a way to say to the government ‘You’ve set yourself up to regulate bitcoin. Regulate this.’”
