Those allegations of murders-for-hire, in fact, dissuaded the first Trump administration from granting clemency to Ulbricht. The White House in 2020 considered freeing Ulbricht but ultimately rejected the idea because of the alleged role of violence in the case, according to one former government official involved in the process who spoke to WIRED on condition…
In this sense, claims Jacob Silverman, coauthor of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, the TRUMP coin setup seems to bear some of the hallmarks of a “classic memecoin pump-and-dump”—a manoeuvre whereby an issuer keeps hold of large amounts of their coin, promotes the project, then cashes in their holdings,…
Less than 24 hours after going dark, TikTok says it has come back online after President-elect Donald Trump gave the company’s service providers—presumably Apple, Google, and Oracle—reassurance that his administration wouldn’t enforce a law banning the app in the first place. “In agreement with our service providers, TikTok is in the process of restoring service,”…
There was a time when Mark Zuckerberg didn’t regard mainstream media as the enemy. He even allowed me, a card-carrying legacy media person, into his home. In April 2018, I ventured there to hear his plans to do the right thing. It was part of my years-long embed into Facebook to write a book. For…
The Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu—better known internationally as RedNote—is scrambling to boost its ability to moderate English-language content after hundreds of thousands of American users suddenly joined the platform in anticipation of TikTok potentially being banned in the United States on Sunday. WIRED identified a handful of job listings posted to recruitment platforms by…
Whether shifting teams to Texas will be anything more than symbolic is unclear. Common sense suggests if a person in California exhibits some sort of political preference, moving them to Texas isn’t likely to reshape their viewpoints immediately. In the same town hall call, company leadership described the Texas relocation as an attempt to address…
With the clock running out on the Biden administration, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Elon Musk in federal court. The statute at hand is relatively straightforward. The timing of the complaint is more complicated. The SEC’s complaint centers on Musk’s acquisition of Twitter stock in early 2022. According to the complaint, Musk…
A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago. Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which…
This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X’s Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation…
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a new measure on Friday that could protect your Robux from scammers and hackers. The proposed rule would interpret terms in the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, or EFTA, which has traditionally been used to protect consumers from unauthorized debit transactions, to include some virtual currencies supplied by gaming and…