Category Archives: The Law

Bitcoin Group's IPO Hit With Stop Order By Australian Regulator

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The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has issued an interim stop order on Sam Lee's Bitcoin Group IPO which intends to float on the Australian Stock Exchange later this year. After considerable delays, the Bitcoin Group lodged its prospectus late last month with the regulator issuing the interim stop order on the 13th of July1. At this time, ASIC provides no information as to why it has issued the interim stop order. ASIC describes a stop order as: Continue reading →

  1. Document #027846316 ↩

Silk Road Heroin Dealer Receives 2-1/2 Years Prison Sentence

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Reuters reports (archive) that Michael Duch AKA Deezletime and otherwise known as the Silk Road heroin dealer who turned government witness and testified (archive) against Ross Ulbricht despite having never communicated with him has been sentenced to a term of 2-1/2 years prison time for conspiring to sell drugs.

A request by Duch's lawyer Samuel Braverman that Duch now be released into a drug treatment program was denied by U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest stating it would be not be the right thing to do. Receiving credit for the 21 months already spent in custody, Duch is expected to be released soon.

Trial For Alleged Ricin Importer Begins

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The Guardian reports (archive) the trial of a British man arrested last February after he allegedly attempted to purchase ricin via the darknet site Evolution Marketplace began this week with the prosecution telling jurors Mohammed Ammer Ali AKA WEIRDOS OOOO attempted to order 500mg of ricin from them paid for in bitcoin and that he promised to be a repeat customer.

Communicating with an undercover FBI agent, Mohammed Ammer Ali is alleged to have arranged the shipment of five 100mg vials from the United States into the UK telling the undercover agent masquerading as a darknet marketplace merchant that: Continue reading →

Limits of Moore's Law Challenge Intel – Questions About Future Performance

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There are numerous reports out today highlighting chip maker Intel's struggles in transitioning from a 14 nanometer to a 10 nanometer manufacturing process. Intel is addressing this challenge by introducing a third generation of chips produced on a 14 nm process. Traditionally Intel delivers two generations of chips at each node size. The first is a shrink of the previous generations chips followed by chips with architectural changes at the same node size, followed by a process shrink. This pattern of Intel's is typically referred to as "Tick" and "Tock" releases at each node size. Continue reading →

BurtW Indictment Dismissed At Behest Of Department Of Justice

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An indictment against BurtW AKA Burt Wagner related to the alleged operation of an unlicenced money transmitting business has been dropped after U.S. District Court Judge William J Martinez dismissed the case at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice. Such a victory is bittersweet though as Burt's wife Jean writes (archive): Continue reading →

Darkode Goes Dark: Members Charged as "Cybercriminals"

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Reports are coming in that an investigation led by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh, and supported by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), has resulted in the shut down of online forum Darkode.com and the arrest of 12 people in connection with the invitation-only web portal.1

Continue reading →

Tsinghua Unigroup Flirts With Acquisition of DRAM Maker Micron

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Chinese state owned enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is rumored to be flirting with an acquisition of Micron Technology, the last maker of DRAM based in the United States. At the moment prevailing wisdom in the mainstream financial press appears to be that the US Treasury's "Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States" would block a sale to the state owned enterprise and if they don't the Department of Defense would likely block Tsinghua Unigroup or any Chinese firm from purchasing Micron. Continue reading →

UK Student Convicted On Darknet Drugs Purchase

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Having plead guilty (archive) to a charge of importing a Class B drug into the UK, 25 year old student Gary Trouve now faces 250 hours of community service as punishment for the 145 grams of "herbal cannabis" he purchased using bitcoin via an unnamed darknet market.

Trouve came to the attention of the UK authorities earlier this year when a parcel pertaining to contain specialist welding equipment was intercepted by customs officers who instead found it to contain cannabis. Having been notified, Humberside Police subsequently attended the residence of Trouve who then gave a full confession of his crime. Continue reading →

Pirate Bay Four Acquitted Of Charges

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The group known as "The Pirate Bay Four" – Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström – accused of criminal copyright infringement and the abuse of electronic communications because prosecutors were able to download copyrighted files from the Pirate Bay website between September 2011 to November 2013 – were acquitted of criminal charges in Belgian court yesterday.

This was a significant legal victory for the four Swedish-born freedom fighters who have been involved in countless legal battles and under constant media scrutiny for nearly a decade for operating and financing the infamously agile and endlessly mirrored torrent site Pirate Bay. Continue reading →