Photo: Bloomberg Businessweek Last year, the CEO of Quintillion, an Alaskan company trying to build a trans-Arctic undersea cable, was charged with wire fraud after forging contracts to help raise more than $250 million from investors. This week, Bloomberg posted a captivating feature about how that CEO nearly pulled off Continue Reading
Mark AR / Twitter Imagine a world that’s filled with invisible graffiti. Open an app, point your phone at a wall, and blank brick or cement becomes a canvas. Create art with digital spraypaint and stencils, and an augmented reality system will permanently store its location and placement, creating the Continue Reading
Photo by Ryan Manning / The Verge Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and chairman of its board until 2014, was among the powerful men who spent a meaningful amount of time with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to reporting from The New York Times. Employees of Gates’ namesake Continue Reading
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve (Fed) said it would restart buying bonds in the open market. Also, it will continue its overnight funding operations until January of next year. Fed’s Cash Injection Is Already Routine For the Fed, pouring cash into the markets is already routine. It seems that policymakers are Continue Reading
Bitcoin (BTC) is running into its eleventh year, while Facebook’s Libra is facing renewed difficulties, with some of the founding members of the Libra Association rescinding their positions. Libra Beleagured by Hawkish Regulators Libra set a goal to launch in early 2020, but regulatory disapproval and hawkish comments from central Continue Reading
The heads of three US financial regulators have issued a warning to the crypto asset industry to adhere to relevant banking laws. In a joint statement released on October 11, signed by Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman Heath Tarbet, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) director Kenneth Blanco and Securities Continue Reading
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has obtained an emergency restraining order against the Telegram Group and its subsidiary TON Issuer. The order has been secured in order to investigate the company’s $1.7 billion token sale. In 2018, The Telegram Open Network #TON raised $1.7B. The round was so Continue Reading
Jordan Peele uses deepfake technology to simulate a speech by Barack Obama as an ironic warning against the rise of deepfakes. | BuzzFeed A new report on deepfakes finds 96 percent involve simulating porn of female celebrities (without their consent). The concept of “deepfakes,” those strange, AI-created videos made to Continue Reading
Americans love using filler words such as “uh,” “uhm,” “like” and “y’know.” A study published in Big Think found that “uh” dominates in the Deep South, New England, Minnesota and Wisconsin. “Uhm” is the preferred filler word in Ohio and Kentucky in the east to Arizona and Wyoming out west. Continue Reading
Timothée Chalamet as King Henry V in Netflix’s The King. | Netflix This movie really wants you to know it ain’t your daddy’s Shakespeare. Early on in Netflix’s The King, Joel Edgerton’s Falstaff makes his first appearance onscreen. But although he has a wine bottle in his hand, he’s not Continue Reading
Joaquin Phoenix stars in Joker. | Warner Bros. The stand-alone R-rated origin story for Batman’s nemesis, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips, won awards and praise while also igniting a firestorm of controversy. Joker, a stand-alone origin story for Batman’s psychotic arch-nemesis, was already one of the most-reviled Continue Reading
Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. | Warner Bros. It’s now the biggest October opening of all time. It’s little surprise when a comic book movie makes a killing at the box office — especially when the reviews are strong and the character is massively popular. And in its first weekend, Joker Continue Reading
By