national affairs

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

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

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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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NATO’s Tech Scouts Are Fortifying Europe for a World With Donald Trump
14 Nov

NATO’s Tech Scouts Are Fortifying Europe for a World With Donald Trump

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It’s the day after Donald Trump declared his election victory, and a tech scout for NATO is peering down at a miniature factory, the size of a shoebox, designed to manufacture semiconductors in space.Chris O’Connor, with his black bomber jacket and military haircut, has spent the past year scouring Europe for companies that will give NATO a technological edge over Russia and China—a job that has become even more urgent in the past 36 hours as the region rushes to prepare for Trump 2.0. Here, in a gray industrial estate on the outskirts of Cardiff in Wales, he believes he’s…
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As Trump Takes a Victory Lap, the Crypto Faithful Kiss the Ring
06 Nov

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

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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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Perplexity Dove Into Real-Time Election Tracking While Other AI Companies Held Back
06 Nov

Perplexity Dove Into Real-Time Election Tracking While Other AI Companies Held Back

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Perplexity’s Election Information Hub might also blur the line between verified and free-wheeling AI-generated information. While some results come directly from trusted sources, searching for more information triggered open-ended AI-generated results from the wider web.Other AI companies appear to be taking a more cautious approach to the election. In WIRED’s testing, ChatGPT Search, a newly launched service from OpenAI, often declined to provide information about voting. “We’ve instructed ChatGPT to not express preferences, offer opinions, or make specific recommendations about political candidates or issues even when explicitly asked,” Mattie Zazueta, an OpenAI spokesperson, told WIRED.The results were often inconsistent, however.…
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The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe
19 Oct

The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe

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A TikTok video of actor Brian Baumgartner, from the American version of The Office, calling for the overthrow of the president of a small European country was an early sign that this would be no ordinary election.Late last year, Baumgartner appeared among a lineup of American celebrities addressing Maia Sandu, the current, pro-European president of Moldova and proclaiming in bad Russian: “We, Hollywood stars, support the people of Moldova in their desire to overthrow you, Sandu.” These weren’t deepfakes. Instead the videos—which researchers suggested were part of a pro-Kremlin influence operation—were commissioned on Cameo, the app that lets anyone buy…
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Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US
12 Sep

Yes, You Can Now Bet on Elections in the US

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A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator.In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia by New York-based Kalshi, which operates a predictions market that allows users to bet on the outcome of various events, from the volume of recorded bird flu cases to the number of cars produced by Tesla. Kalshi filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn a CFTC decision preventing it from offering bets…
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Impersonators Take Advantage as the Trumps Delay Crypto Reveal
04 Sep

Impersonators Take Advantage as the Trumps Delay Crypto Reveal

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Impersonators have descended on a soon-to-be-announced crypto venture tied to presidential candidate Donald Trump and his family, capitalizing on gaps in information about the project to promote inauthentic crypto tokens.Led by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the sons of the former president, the Trumps have embarked on a campaign to promote an upcoming project—called World Liberty Financial—on social media. For the best part of a month, the family has teased the launch in cryptic posts that offer little detail.In an X post on August 6, Eric wrote that he had “truly fallen in love with crypto.” The following day,…
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Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP
30 Aug

Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Be Neutral–While Tossing Gifts to Trump and the GOP

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This week Mark Zuckerberg sent a letter to Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. For months, the GOP-led committee has been on a crusade to prove that Meta, via its once-eponymous Facebook app, engaged in political sabotage by taking down right-wing content. Its investigation has involved thousands of documents, and the committee interviewed multiple employees, which failed to locate a smoking gun. Now, under the guise of offering his take on the subject, Zuckerberg’s letter is a mea culpa where he seems to indicate that there was something to the GOP conspiracy theory.Specifically, he said that in…
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Kamala Harris’ Rally Crowds Aren’t AI-Generated. Here’s How You Can Tell
13 Aug

Kamala Harris’ Rally Crowds Aren’t AI-Generated. Here’s How You Can Tell

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Suffice it to say that this mountain of evidence from direct sources weighs more heavily than marked-up images from conservative commentators like Chuck Callesto and Dinesh D'Souza, both of whom have been caught spreading election disinformation in the past.When it comes to accusations of AI fakery, the more disparate sources of information you have, the better. While a single source can easily generate a plausible-looking image of an event, multiple independent sources showing the same event from multiple angles are much less likely to be in on the same hoax. Photos that line up with video evidence are even better,…
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Donald Trump’s Plan to Hoard Billions in Bitcoin Has Economists Stumped
31 Jul

Donald Trump’s Plan to Hoard Billions in Bitcoin Has Economists Stumped

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Even if Trump were to restrict the reserve to bitcoin seized through law enforcement activity, his administration must also weigh up the opportunity cost associated with holding onto bitcoin. Whereas some assets—like bonds—generate a consistent income stream for holders, bitcoin does not, making it expensive to hold.“The question comes down to what the government would get out of the hoards of bitcoin it would be holding,” says George Selgin, director emeritus for the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute, a US think tank that promotes libertarian principles. Previously, the US government has periodically auctioned off the…
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