Daily Tech News 1 December 2022

• Here's everything that went wrong with FTX. (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, it just "went wrong". By accident.
  
  
  
• FTX's Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident. (CoinDesk)
  
  That's more like it.

  In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened. August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried's intent and culpability.

  More October institutions, possibly November, but yes.

  It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors. That's why a recent New York Times interview was widely derided for seeming to frame FTX's collapse as the result of mismanagement rather than malfeasance. A Wall Street Journal article bemoaned the loss of charitable donations from FTX, arguably propping up Bankman-Fried's strategic philanthropic pose. Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried's money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled.

  This is the straight shit. If you're interested in the real story behind this latter day love child of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff, read most of the thing.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk met with Tim Cook and announced that the war is cancelled. (Yahoo Finance)
  
  Build your own war.

• Samsung's GDDR6W memory doubles capacity and performance by the clever trick of, um, being two chips. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's literally two chips. One device to surface-mount, which might make assembly simpler and cheaper, but two slivers of silicon inside it, with twice as many leads and twice the power consumption.
  
  
  
• Laspass says hackers breached its systems and accessed customer data. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  They're probably running Elasticsearch on QNAP.
  
  
  
• The hackers got GoTo too. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  GoTo - formerly LogMeIn - apparently shares the same QNAP device as Lastpass.
  
  
  
• Security researchers at Akamai left a space out of a command line and accidentally murdered a botnet. (Bleeping Computer)

  "In our controlled environment, we were able to send commands to the bot to test its functionality and attack signatures," Akamai vulnerability researcher Larry Cashdollar - we swear we are not making this up - explained in a new report.
  
  "As part of this analysis, a syntax error caused the bot to stop sending commands, effectively killing the botnet."

  Mission failed successfully.
  
  
  
• Autonomous trucking company Embark has silently evaporated. (Crunchbase)
  
  The company's market cap has dwindled from $5 billion to $110 million, even though it still has $190 million in cash reserves.
  
  If that's not a show of confidence, I don't know what is.
  
  And they did it without any splashy fraud or missed earnings - they don't have any earnings yet. Investors just decided, yeah, not so much.
  
  Autonomous vehicles are hard, and with interest rates up sharply investors are looking for returns in this lifetime rather than the next.
  
  
  
• Anker lied about the security of its security cameras. (The Verge)
  
  There isn't any.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments