Bitcoin Company Operator Arrested, Big Bank Money Launderers Continue to Walk Free

From Business Insider:

The CEO of BitInstant, a Bitcoin exchange, has been arrested at JFK airport and charged with money laundering.  Charlie Shrem, along with a co-conspirator, is accused of selling over $1 million in bitcoins to Silk Road users, who would then use them to buy drugs and other illicit items.

Meanwhile, global money laundering operations like those at HSBC skate by with a cost-of-doing-business fine and no arrests.  From Reuters:

U.S. regulators continue to find weaknesses in the way HSBC Holdings tries to prevent money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter, even after the British bank was forced to pay nearly $2 billion in penalties and invested millions in increasing its compliance.

Navy Experimenting with Virtual Reality

From the Daily Mail (yes, the Daily Mail, so try to avoid retching if possible):

The US Navy has given a glimpse into the future of war - and it has gone virtual.  In this stunning image researchers show off the first attempt at a virtual ship's command centre. Using the Oculus rift headset, it shows a soldier on a virtual ship.

However, the Navy has remained tight-lipped about its plans for virtual training. The project, codenamed Blueshark, it testing how technology can be used by the Navy in 2015. It's official description is: 'a mix of near-term and further out technologies. It is an ongoing conversation about what the future of collaboration will be like, and how technology can assist in that endeavor.'

Google Considering Bitcoin Integration or Not

Some mixed messages from Google regarding Bitcoin.  From Forbes:

Google’s Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra . . . Gundotra wrote [Malik] back. He also forwarded Malik’s query to another Google staffer and started a series of email exchanges that  led to one Googler telling Malik that the company is indeed pondering how it can make use of the world’s first form of decentralized digital cash.

“We are working in the payments team to figure out how to incorporate bitcoin into our plans,” wrote Google Senior VP of Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy at one point in the email exchange that Malik forwarded to me. He promised to get back in touch “when we are a little more sure.”

However, the company told a slightly different story to Forbes:

I reached out to Google, and the company responded in a very different tone, but didn’t deny that the comments Malik posted to Reddit were real. “As we continue to work on Google Wallet, we’re grateful for a very wide range of suggestions,” a spokesperson writes. ”While we’re keen to actively engage with Wallet users to help inform and shape the product, there’s no change to our position: we have no current plans regarding Bitcoin.”

T-Mobile Takes on the Money Changers with Mobile Money

The so-called "underbanked" segments of the population will be well served by such a service.  Hopefully it and similar services will help to undermine the parasitic banking sector.  From Engaget:

T-Mobile's latest service seems to fit its 'UnCarrier' agenda perfectly, since it has little connection to wireless and doesn't actually require users to have the company's phone service. Called Mobile Money, the personal finance product combines a smartphone app (iOS or Android) with a branded prepaid Visa card. Without paying a single fee, T-Mobile wireless customers can deposit checks into their Mobile Money account by taking a picture of them with their smartphone, withdraw money from 42,000 in-network ATMs and reload the cards with cash at T-Mobile stores (non-T-Mobile customers would pay additional fees). There are also no maintenance fees, minimum balances or activation fees.

Use of Online Privacy and Anonymity Tools on the Rise

From the Guardian:

Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated 415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to disguise their identity or location.

On these figures, Tor could be regularly used by as many as 45.13 million people. Its biggest userbase appears to be in Indonesia, where 21% of respondents said they used the tool, followed by 18% in Vietnam and 15% in India. 

Indonesia also has the world's highest penetration of general anonymity tools among its internet users, with 42% using proxy servers or virtual private networks known as VPNs, which disguise the location of the user's internet connection - their IP address - and therefore bypass regional blocks on certain content.

The US, UK, Germany and Ireland meanwhile all report 17% penetration, with Japan the lowest at 5%. The data includes those aged 16-64 for the last quarter of 2013.

NYT Profiles Ross Ulbricht

From the NYT:

Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the s
cience fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That computer, according to the F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the world’s largest and most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD. 

50 Python Resources for Beginner and Intermediate Programmers

This is the third post in our recent series for beginning Python programmers.  In the first post, I detailed a self-study time table for beginner Python programmers.  The second post then laid out learning benchmarks for the project on the basis of MIT's Introduction to Computer Science course.  Today's installment provides a categorized list of Python resources for beginner to intermediate programmers.  Add any others you've found helpful in the comments and I'll update the list.  Enjoy!

Textbooks
Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
The Art and Craft of Programming: Python Edition
A Byte of Python
Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
Python Programming WikiBook
Python Style Guide
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
Building Skills in Python: A Programmer's Introduction to Python

Tutorial Textbooks
Learn Python the Hard Way
Dive Into Python
Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
Making Games with Python and Pygame
A Beginner's Python Tutorial: Civilization IV

Intro Web Tutorials
Learn Python in Ten Minutes
Code Academy: Python Track
Python-Course: Intro to Python
Google Developers: Python Introduction
pGuides: Python
New Coder Python Tutorials
Tutorials Point: Python

Video
Python Video Index
43 Short, Targeted Intro Python Video Tutorials 
A Hands-on Introduction to Python for Beginning Programmers 
Python for Programmers: A Project-Based Tutorial
Google Developers' Python Class
Learn Python Through Public Data Hacking
Growing Python with Spreadsheets
Python for Hackers: Networkers Primer

Targeted Web Tutorials
How to Use the Reddit API in Python
Intro to Python Web Scraping
Python Network Programming
Sockets in Python: Into the World of Python Network Programming
Sockets Programming in Python
Python gnupg (GPG) Example

GUI Programming
An Introduction to Tkinter
Getting Started with wxPy
Creating an Application in Kivy 

Web Programming
Hacked Existence Full Django Website Tutorial Series
How to Tango with Django

Targeted Textbooks (Advanced)
Natural Language Processing with Python 
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python 

Reference
Python Standard Library
Python Package Index
Effbot Guide to the Python Standard Library
Python Module of the Week
Python Cheat Sheet (quick reference guide)
Ivan Idris' Almost a Hundred Python Resources

Projects and Sample Code
Karan's Python Mega Project List
Active State: Popular Python Recipes