donald trump

Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Is Waiting for Trump to Keep His Word—and Set Him Free

Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Is Waiting for Trump to Keep His Word—and Set Him Free

At sentencing, the judge was also permitted to take under consideration the murder-for-hire allegations, despite them never having been charged at trial. “Until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, relevant but uncharged crimes of this sort can be and are regularly considered by judges,” says Richman.Ulbricht has never fully acknowledged the harm inflicted by the Silk Road’s vast sales of drugs that included heroin and other opiates, and he still shows little remorse for his actions in his public posts to Twitter, argues Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a former Homeland Security Investigations agent who infiltrated the Silk Road undercover as part of the…
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Donald Trump Isn’t the Only Chaos Agent

Donald Trump Isn’t the Only Chaos Agent

Eight years ago, the November US election results profoundly shocked the small staff at Backchannel, the boutique tech publication I headed. The morning after, an editor posted on our Slack that working on a technology story seemed tone-deaf, if not futile. On a plane from New York to San Francisco, I wrote a column to answer that impulse, directed as much to myself and my colleagues as it was to readers. I argued that regardless of the enormity of this event, one thing hadn’t changed; the biggest story of our time was still the technological revolution we were living through.…
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What Donald Trump’s Win Will Mean for Big Tech

What Donald Trump’s Win Will Mean for Big Tech

The most raucous cheers of the night were prompted by Trump’s promise to fire Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency that has brought a volley of lawsuits against crypto businesses under the Biden administration.Separately, Trump has promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of darknet marketplace Silk Road, who is currently serving life in prison. Silk Road, through which people bought and sold drugs and other contraband, was among the first online services to accept bitcoin as payment. The severity of Ulbricht’s sentence is widely considered to be disproportionate by bitcoiners,…
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As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring

As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring

On the campaign trail, Trump went out of his way to court their favor. In July, speaking to thousands of bitcoiners at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump duly sang from the bitcoin hymn sheet, promising to cement the US as the foremost bitcoin mining powerhouse, establish a national “bitcoin stockpile,” and appoint a bitcoin advisory council if reelected. Trump claimed he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet.”In October, Trump went as far as to launch his own crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, which his family has marketed as a way to “make finance great…
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TikTok Employees Shrug Off the US Election

TikTok Employees Shrug Off the US Election

TikTok is one of the tech companies that could be most impacted by the outcome of the US elections. But as the election result looms, employees there found themselves surprisingly disengaged from the high-level political drama that could decide the app’s fate.A San Jose-based product manager, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, says he was more worried about the TikTok ban before he joined the company earlier this year than now. He claims his colleagues rarely bring up the topic, and his team plans future product features in the app as if there’s…
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Election 2024: What will the candidates do about the digital divide?

Election 2024: What will the candidates do about the digital divide?

The US presidential election is in its final stretch. Before election day on November 5, Engadget is looking at where the candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, stand on the most consequential tech issues of our day.Broadband access in poorer and more rural communities has been a major campaign issue since 2008. Bridging the digital divide was a key component of Barack Obama’s platform. And, while far from perfect, his administration did a lot of work to grow the nation’s fiber-optic infrastructure, free up wireless spectrum and expand access to subsidies for low-income families. While successive administrations have promised to…
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Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions

Profiteers Are Exploiting US Election Conspiracies and Hate to Make Millions

The messages, potentially misleading US citizens or stoking hate towards various groups, will have been seen by many times more people than actually made a purchase.Those running the network of Facebook pages in Nigeria may simply believe that US-focused clickbait is the best way to boost the number of people who see their scams. In contrast, the ecommerce operations identified by TBIJ give every impression that they are proudly American.Yet analysis of their listed physical addresses and online presence suggests that the businesses are at least partly run from Vietnam, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, and Croatia (with Facebook page admins…
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X’s Community Notes feature has one job, and it’s failing to do it

X’s Community Notes feature has one job, and it’s failing to do it

It’s no secret that X has become an even bigger cesspool of misleading information, unchecked claims and flat-out falsities since Elon Musk took over. Two new reports from The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and The Washington Post reveals that the safeguards Musk removed and replaced aren’t controlling X’s problems with misinformation. on its investigation into X’s Community Notes feature, a user-driven reporting system in which anonymous users write and rate correction for misleading posts. Researchers took a sample of 283 misleading election posts from the social media platform that received proposed Community Notes between January 1 and August…
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Elon Musk’s Criticism of ‘Woke AI’ Suggests ChatGPT Could Be a Trump Administration Target

Elon Musk’s Criticism of ‘Woke AI’ Suggests ChatGPT Could Be a Trump Administration Target

Mittelsteadt adds that Trump could punish companies in a variety of ways. He cites, for example, the way the Trump government canceled a major federal contract with Amazon Web Services, a decision likely influenced by the former president’s view of the Washington Post and its owner, Jeff Bezos.It would not be hard for policymakers to point to evidence of political bias in AI models, even if it cuts both ways.A 2023 study by researchers at the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Xi’an Jiaotong University found a range of political leanings in different large language models. It also showed…
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Europe’s Big Tech Hawks Brace for a Post-Biden Future

Europe’s Big Tech Hawks Brace for a Post-Biden Future

For Europe, the outcome of next week’s US election will have profound consequences. NATO funding is at stake, as is a potential peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Projections suggest a trade war with Donald Trump could hit GDP in the bloc’s biggest economy, Germany, by 1.5 percent. The future of big tech, by comparison, is a sideshow—but a fraught one. President Joe Biden’s administration ushered in a new era of confrontation with the likes of Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia, which all faced legal action during his time in office. A proposal to break-up Google is still pending.Unlike many other…
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