The nights are drawing in, the carved pumpkins are in home windows and the neighbourhood kids are getting ready to trigger hassle, so right here’s three tales of tech terror – ones that can resonate lengthy after the sweet is gone.
The Thriller of the Lacking Cash
Sam was an up-and-coming younger entrepreneur, making waves in Silicon Valley, when all of a sudden, by means of no fault of his personal, billions of {dollars} simply … vanished. A minimum of that’s what he’s telling the cops …
The trial of cryptocurrency hero-to-zero Sam Bankman-Fried, often known as SBF, is coming to a detailed. After weeks of damaging testimony from former colleagues, buddies and lovers – a few of whom are all three at once – he’s taken the stand in his defence.
From the outdoors, the case could seem simple. The agreed-on details are damaging: Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency alternate FTX misplaced billions of buyer cash. However (this isn’t authorized recommendation) it’s not against the law to lose cash. It’s not even against the law to guarantee traders that you simply’re positively going to earn money and then lose cash.
What’s against the law, although, is to lie about these issues. And so the job of the prosecution has been to determine not that SBF was a foolhardy Pollyannaish braggadocio who performed quick and unfastened with different folks’s cash, however that he knew precisely what he was doing. In distinction, SBF’s defence group have what may seem to be the simpler job: to easily persuade folks that their consumer – who as soon as described his own sector as a Ponzi scheme, who agreed he would keep it up taking all or nothing bets until it led to the extinction of all life on Earth, who took calls with multibillion traders while gaming (badly) – is an fool.
And so, from our story:
Bankman-Fried’s resolution to testify in his personal protection is a dangerous one, as it can enable prosecutors the probability to cross-examine him. He has up to now remained silent by means of a three-week trial as former members of his internal circle testified that he directed them to commit crimes, together with diverting buyer funds from FTX to his hedge fund, Alameda Analysis, and that he lied to traders and lenders.
He was requested in November 2022 throughout his first interview after the alternate evaporated: “Are your attorneys suggesting it’s a good suggestion for you to be talking?” Bankman-Fried answered: “No, they’re very a lot not … I’ve an obligation to speak; I’ve an obligation to elucidate what occurred.”
On Friday, Bankman-Fried started his testimony in exactly the way you’d expect:
“I made various small errors and various massive errors,” Bankman-Fried, 31, mentioned in sharing his model of the rise and fall of crypto buying and selling platform FTX. The most important mistake, he mentioned, was not implementing a devoted threat administration group. “There have been vital oversights,” he mentioned. His testimony additionally recommended that he’ll try to make clear the encryption and data-retention practices at FTX, and clarify away seemingly spurious actions of cash.
The Web site Killer
They are saying crime doesn’t pay. However should you’re wealthy sufficient, you may get away with homicide. The grisly dismemberment of Twitter has been occurring for a yr now, and for every part the web site has been stripped of – its belief and security group, its API, even its very identify – it nonetheless hasn’t been put out of its distress …
It’s been a yr precisely since Elon Musk took management of Twitter, presently often called X. The worst fears of detractors haven’t fairly come to move: whereas outages and vital bugs have develop into starkly more common since swingeing cuts of greater than 5,000 workers, the web site has not but suffered a catastrophic knowledge loss or long-term outage.
As a substitute, it’s to Musk’s credit score that the most consequential modifications to the web site appear to be deliberate. As he seeks to stem the monetary losses and remodel the social community into an “every part app” loosely modelled on China’s WeChat, Musk’s scattershot method to product design has seen the web site block hyperlinks to different social networks, artificially delay hyperlinks to main information websites, take away verification of professional accounts, spotlight paying customers in replies, forestall logged-out customers from studying threads, enable advertisers to cover the “advert” marker, and made it more durable to direct message customers.
Personally, I might not have finished these issues. However I suppose that’s why I’m a easy journalist and Elon Musk stays, some days, the world’s richest man. Nonetheless, he’s doing an excellent job of dropping different folks’s cash. From the Wall Street Journal:
The banks that financed Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter are still struggling a year later to contain the damage to their balance sheets.
The banks currently expect to take a hit of at least 15%, or roughly $2 billion, when they sell the debt, people familiar with the matter said … Bankers close to the deal say that Musk’s capricious management and a weakening advertising market could point to a junk-bond rating, a designation reserved for companies at higher risk of defaulting.
As Josh Taylor wrote in this newsletter two weeks ago, Twitter remains bizarrely important for political discussion in the Anglosphere, with wonks and legislators likely to be hand in hand with Sports Twitter as the last major community to depart the site. Imagine a world where 4chan inexplicably became a major government comms channel, and you’re pretty close to where we are right now. Surely this will have no long-term consequences.
The Puzzle Puzzle
In a dusty attic, you find a beguiling artefact: a puzzle box, with a tower of letters rising up one side. Feeling compelled, you trace a connection, spelling out a word; as you do, the letters disappear, new ones falling down to take their place. What could happen if – no, you know what, this one just isn’t particularly scary, is it?
The success of Wordle was the feelgood tech story of 2022. A simple word game goes viral, and sells for millions of dollars to the New York Times. The sale also focused attention on the centrality of games to the newspapers’ commercial strategy. The NYT crossword is the undisputed king of American word games, while its Spelling Bee, mini crosswords and, recently, its Connections game (a vaguely controversial ripoff of the Only Connect wall) all have ardent fans. The paper even sells a games-only subscription, charging £25 a year for premium access.
The newspaper business has always known the importance of the games and puzzles pages, even if it briefly forgot about them in the transition to online publishing. And now, the digital first upstarts are discovering the same reality. Apple launched a Puzzles tab in iOS 17 (though not yet in the UK), offering a daily crossword for subscribers of the company’s $12.99 monthly News+ service, apparently recognising that its absence was keeping many loyal to their existing news subscriptions.
But crossword puzzles are just as liable to “unbundling” as daily weather reports, classified adverts and personals. What would they look like if they were freed from the newspaper altogether? Probably something like Puzzmo, a new service that launched in beta last week from veteran puzzler Zach Gage, the creator of hit apps including Really Bad Chess, Good Sudoku, SpellTower and Knotwords (and backed, for what it’s worth, by Hearst Newspapers, which still owns a large conglomerate of US local papers including the San Francisco Chronicle). From the site’s “manifesto”:
Games must never trick you out of your time. You should never wonder “what am I even doing with my life?” when you play a game. Good games are a collaborator to you in the pursuit of fun. Good games inspire curiosity.
That link above probably won’t work for you, though, because Puzzmo is in the cutest closed beta I’ve ever seen: the site is dripping 500 invitations a day to the first people to solve one of its puzzles, growing its community slowly while it irons out the kinks. Not to brag, but I didn’t have to pull the journalist card to get my own invitation to join.
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TechScape: Crypto in the dock, Musk in the frame and fiendish puzzles – three chilling tech tales for Halloween | Technology www.theguardian.com 2023-10-31 12:22:47
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