> Some of the stolen Bitcoin successfully laundered last year has been traced to a wallet known to be used by Russian-linked criminal groups. Elliptic says this could point to the involvement of a broker or other intermediary with a link to Russia.
IMO, the most compelling story is that the thief is an attacker who had previously gained access, saw the news, and acted quickly to grab what they could. Security was not exactly a priority for these people.
While a mild pain, I don’t see Russia really having that many issues if they can’t just wire money from A to B.
Russia sells oil to India, India puts rupees or some other representation of currency into an Indian bank account and then Russia buys some finished Indian goods from that bank account.
This isn’t far from regular banking where everyone just tries to keep flows balanced. All that’s new is being unable to directly “balance” payments if they go out of whack too much.
Do they lose a few percent doing this? Probably, but the spike in oil prices makes up for it.
If you just hack you don't need any of that though. Balancing, goods delivery, currency controls... Drain a western company, mix crypto for optics, give it to Iran or DPRK or whatever in exchange for munition
Plus India and relatively reasonable countries are not especially keen on trading with Russia, while they are friends they also want to be friends with West. Remember India has big problems with China and who's gonna help them against China? not Russia
People are willing to override a lot of their ethical concerns (and accept potential long term pain in favour of short term gain) when it comes to slightly cheaper oil, gas, labour or any other need and want.
A few countries got themselves in a pickle after shutting down local coal production in favour of cheap and cleaner Russian gas…
I don't know what is widely assumed, but I personally assume it was one of the insiders who shared credentials with the pretty clear intention of making it impossible to individually attribute any shenanigans, most likely SBF himself who actually did the theft.
Given the degree of surveillance he is under, he probably didn't directly execute the sale (but I wouldn't bet too heavily even on that.)
i would guess about 0% likelihood it is him. more liekly a hacker or employee. Being CEO, Sam would have the authority to take the money himself. He would not need to hack his own exchange.
We're a talking private company in the Bahamas that has no oversight. There are no shareholders, board of directors, or audits. Sam can just go to the databases of pooled funds addresses from his admin panel and move some of those funds from A to B. Assuming anyone notices, he can pretend to be clueless. That is the scary thing about exchanges and why so many people in crypto say to self-custody. Your money is in the hands of people who can do whatever they want with it.
Didn't at least one major theft occur just as Altman was forced out as CEO?
And, in any case, avoiding attribution would be important whether or not he was CEO and especially if done when FTX was still pretending to be a viable business, since embezzlement isn’t legal and the CEO running off with a bunch of corporate assets kind of kills trust in the business.
The FBI et al are very good at surveillance. I doubt anyone close enough to SBF to be part of a criminal conspiracy would be unknown to the FBI or not under surveillance at this point.
Being _known_ by the FBI doesn’t stop crime or terror attacks. More often than not when something big happens the FBI was already tipped off, an investigation started and then somehow someway the crime/attack/incident still happens.
If someone is willing to steal from their customers and injure innocent, random public, then it seems like a small character epsilon to also steal from their employer and its investors.
Why would he need to hack his own exchange if he is CEO? He can just move the funds himself. I would wager it is not North Korea. Probably some guy in a developed country if I had to guess. That was the case with Bitfinex , for example. It's not who you would expect.
Definitely North Korea. Just like that time the feds blamed North Korea for the Sony hack and then years later it was quietly revealed to have been a disgruntled former employee.
Occam’s Razor says it’s an employee, perhaps SBF himself (because #yolo).
> Why did the FBI then start a manhunt on Reddit leading to the suicide of the falsely accused suspect?
You have your facts completely mixed up. The man falsely accused by Reddit, not the FBI, had died a month before the Boston bombings occurred. The entire reason he was accused by Reddit is because he was already known to have been missing. His body was subsequently discovered more than a month after he died.
I can't find any evidence this happened. What I did find evidence for is that Redditors started a manhunt leading to a suicide. If you actually believe this happened, please inform us.
> What I did find evidence for is that Redditors started a manhunt leading to a suicide
The guy he's talking about was already dead weeks before the Boston bombing occurred. Reddit could not have been responsible for his death, reddit libeled a dead man.
I was curious about this. The guy you're saying was falsely accused was ALREADY dead from suicide before the bombing took place. His body was found days after the bombing according to Wikipedia [1]. (took 3 seconds to find this reference)
Also its a bit ridiculous to suggest the FBI tasked redditors with a manhunt.
Additionally, I'd wager a good majority of their paying customers had no idea the controversy was happening, or weren't going to change their entire office operating procedures because the owners may have some caustic opinions.
Yes, that's the other thing. (Corporate) customers almost universally do not care about internal company drama unless it materially affects them (such as with the recent Hashicorp license changes). Even end consumers don't much care, otherwise Nestlé would not continue to be as successful as it is. There is only so much energy that people can expend daily to care about something, and usually other people's drama is not it.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu - It's an odd combination of intense physical activity and human chess (setting up attacks in advance while also trying to deflect your opponents attacks, except using chokes or joint breaks). Grapplers are either freak athletes, 120lb stoners, or business professionals. BJJ is one of the most unique sports/martial arts out there, and I encourage everyone to try it at least once.
I started after enrolling my children in it, and then figuring "why the hell not, I should train too."
BJJ is great. I wrestled folkstyle in high school, and then transitioned to BJJ and submission wrestling as an adult. It's a ton of fun and a great workout. Can't recommend highly enough.
I only got out of it because of a combination of A. lack of time, and B. injuries (note: the injuries were more from mountain biking than from BJJ, but I did tear a hip adductor muscle once in BJJ training).
This seems shortsighted. There are dozens of reasons you may want to get to know your neighbors: help each other out, become friends, watch a package, babysit, petsit, and so forth. Sure, nothing may happen from an interaction, but it seems one of the unique aspects of living in an apartment complex is that you can easily know your neighbors.
I live in a large neighborhood of single-family homes and know many of my neighbors, most of which have become good, trusted friends.
I'm amazed people find pleasant apartments to live in. I think I hate every one of my neighbors. From their annoying behaviors. I have one that just let's their kids run around, blasting music at the moment and kept parking in my assigned spot.
I agree. From his site it appears he's a "coach" that some executive hires to hold an all hands team building exercise that the rank-and-file completely dread. No thanks.
That's exactly what we do: submitting a search/filter form through a POST request which creates a record in the database representing the search/filter criteria and then redirects to the same endpoint with the ID of that record. The endpoint looks for the ID in the query, attempts to load the same record, and if found, executes and returns the search results.
It works very well, is completely transparent to the end user, has automatic query logging, and provides a clean URL that can be easily shared.
I really wish I'd thought of this method when I was building a search based application. It was my first time and I struggled with structuring everything
Great to hear some people still follow the KISS method. I've done the same for years and this very simple setup can scale to tens of millions of (database intensive) requests per week.
Home service businesses (contractors, electricians, plumbers, HVAC, roofers, etc). Even houses owned by banks/investment groups need repairs done. It's a huge industry that desperately needs employees.
These are among the first businesses to get hit by a recession. Sure, you may call the plumber to fix a leaky pipe but that bathroom remodel project is on hold. New construction, where a lot of contractors make the bulk of their money, also dries up.
Not the OP, but also selling B2B software. You can hold a user accountable that they'll actually use the software purchased. The company is spending a lot of money on it, finds value in it, and wants to ensure it's being used and implemented correctly.
B2B software with figures like the OP means you're building a professional relationship with a customer (as opposed to a transactional one), and can push back when they're complaining about something, for example.
> "Your software isn't giving us the numbers you said it would!"
> "It will, if you use it as you were instructed, we're happy to review that with you again, but you have to have the internal SOP that you'll use it in the way it was intended if you want the numbers it can provide."
Also, users are sometimes simply ordered, by their bosses or IT, not to press buttons in ways that are known to break the software. This is sometimes considered cheaper than fixing bugs, or at the very least, mitigates the problem until the next scheduled deployment window. It’s a very different world.
Very true, but I'd paraphrase it more positively: If the deployment cycle is long/complicated/expensive enough, everyone is happy if a whack workaround exists and it's not breaking everything. Not all bugs are actually critical and have to be solved the next day.
And I'm saying this a developer, where we would (and have) gladly sometimes fixed the bug during the 1h call with the customer, but until it was being rolled out... weeks, maybe months.
For our product, a user not using our software properly would be like any arbitrary office worker incorrectly using Microsoft Word.
At some level, it is still our responsibility to provide a reasonable UX (and we have weekly meetings with our customers about this). But, our customers are also fully aware of the various contractual obligations and take ownership of problems caused by poor training or hires on their end.
Perhaps you could extend the Pipe class and thus the pipe() method returns an object for chainability? That's the only reason I can immediately think of.
