Yahoo Mail Hacked

Uh oh!  From the CBC:

Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo's email customers ha
ve been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday.

Yahoo didn't say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the United States.

All the people who apparently do not care about widespread dragnet surveillance and backdoors installed in software and hardware at the behest of government spy agencies, apparently do not realize that these same "tools" can and will be used by anyone at all. 

FinCEN Issues Two Rulings on "Virtual Currency"

A press release from the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network:

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today published two administrative rulings, providing additional information on whether a person’s conduct related to convertible virtual currency brings them within the Bank Secrecy Act’s (BSA) definition of a money transmitter. The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user is not a money transmitter under the BSA. The second states that a company purchasing and selling convertible virtual currency as an investment exclusively for the company’s benefit is not a money transmitter. The rulings further interpret FinCEN’s March 18, 2013 Guidance to address these business models.

The two rulings will certainly help clear things up for miners and Bitcoin startups. 

Clueless Judge Thinks Government Can Be Trusted

Here's a funny little tidbit from the ongoing court case surrounding the former Lavabit secure email service. An appeals court judge believes that the government can be trusted not to abuse its powers.  From Ars Technica:

In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.

The first report of the appeals argument from PC World suggests that while Levison may be a hero with privacy advocates, he's going to have a tougher time convincing the judges on the appeals court. The case was “blown out of proportion with all these contentions” of what the FBI would do with the SSL keys, said US Circuit Judge Paul Niemeyer. "There’s such a willingness to believe” that the keys will be misused and that "the government will spy on everyone,” he said.

Regulatory Hearings on Bitcoin Begin in NYC

From the NYT:

A hearing on the regulatory future of Bitcoin on Tuesday turned into a forum on the shortcomings of the traditional banking industry.  The hearing, called by New York State’s top financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, gave five Bitcoin advocates the chance to enumerate what they view as the advantages Bitcoin could provide over current systems of moving money around the world. 

“Solutions don’t really come from the current industry,” said Cameron Winklevoss, who, with his twin brother, Tyler, has invested in Bitcoin companies. They were early players in Facebook.  Even Mr. Lawsky got in some digs when he complained that it takes three days for his bank to transfer money to pay a credit card bill at the same bank.

When Mr. Lawsky asked about efforts by banks to create their own Bitcoin alternatives, Fred Wilson, a leading venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, said “no one is going to build on top of JPMorgan Chase’s Bitcoin.”

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.”