173333201
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
A former takeaway worker found with Bitcoin worth more than £2bn has been convicted at Southwark Crown Court of a crime linked to money laundering.
Jian Wen, 42, from Hendon in north London, was involved in converting the currency into assets including multi-million-pound houses and jewellery.
On Monday she was convicted of entering into or becoming concerned in a money laundering arrangement.
The Met said the seizure is the largest of its kind in the UK.
110609056
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mrspoonsi writes:
Facebook usage has plummeted over the last year, according to data seen by the Guardian, though the company says usage by other measures continues to grow.
Since April 2018, the first full month after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in the Observer, actions on Facebook such as likes, shares and posts have dropped by almost 20%, according to the business analytics firm Mixpanel. The decline coincided with a series of data, privacy and hate speech scandals. In September the company discovered a breach affecting 50m accounts, in November it admitted that an executive hired a PR firm to attack the philanthropist George Soros, and it has been repeatedly criticised for allowing its platform to be used to fuel ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. “On top of that, Facebook has continued to lose younger users, who are spreading their time and attention across other social platforms and digital activities,” eMarketer said.
104628382
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
In October, the Linux kernel project adopted a new Code of Conduct with the aim of enforcing more inclusive language; while it did have plenty of supporters, it also had detractors who were not keen on the idea at all. Today, Jarkko Sakkinen from Intel began putting the Code of Conduct into practice against several code comments, replacing the F-word with 'hug'. Following the change, several contributors responded to the alterations calling them insane, one wondered if Sakkinen was just trying to make a joke, and another called it censorship and said he’d refuse to apply any sort of patches like this to the code he's in charge of. Another contributor said they didn’t mind the change but that some of the sentences were now difficult to understand, this was echoed by a Dutch contributor who said the replacements were confusing for non-native English speakers. Some of the post-change comments read “Some Athlon laptops have really hugged PST tables”, “If you don’t see why, please stay the hug away from my code”, and “Only Sun can take such nice parts and hug up the programming interface”.
92244081
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Shares in Tesla have plummeted 13% this week after lower than expected deliveries and the Model S only attaining an acceptable result in recent crash tests. IIHS state "Tesla made changes to the safety belt in vehicles built after January with the intent of reducing the dummy's forward movement. However, when IIHS tested the modified Model S, the same problem occurred, and the rating didn't change. Although the two tested vehicles had identical structure, the second test resulted in greater intrusion into the driver's space because the left front wheel movement wasn't consistent. Maximum intrusion increased from less than 2 inches to 11 inches in the lower part and to 5 inches at the instrument panel in the second test."
82909985
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
All companies, including Apple, should pay a 50% tax rate, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has told the BBC. He said he doesn't like the idea that Apple does not pay tax at the same rate he does personally. "I don't like the idea that Apple might be unfair — not paying taxes the way I do as a person. "I do a lot of work, I do a lot of travel and I pay over 50% of anything I make in taxes and I believe that's part of life and you should do it." When asked if Apple should pay that amount, he replied: "Every company in the world should." He said he was never interested in money, unlike his former partner Steve Jobs. "Steve Jobs started Apple Computers for money, that was his big thing and that was extremely important and critical and good." Three years ago the company admitted two of its Irish subsidiaries pay a rate of 2%. It has built up offshore cash reserves of around $200bn — beyond the reach of US tax officials.
82281027
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Navinder Sarao, the trader accused of helping to trigger the US "flash crash", can be extradited to face trial, a court has ruled. Mr Sarao traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from his parents' home near Heathrow Airport in London. Mr Sarao, 37, is accused of contributing to events on 6 May 2010, when the Dow Jones share index briefly fell more than 1,000 points. The flash crash on 6 May 2010 temporarily wiped nearly $1 trillion off the value of shares. US authorities want Mr Sarao to stand trial on 22 criminal counts. They allege he is guilty of "spoofing" — the practice of placing large orders that manipulate the markets and then cancelling or changing them, allowing him to buy or sell at a profit. Mr Sarao's spoofing netted him a profit of $40m (£28m), they argue. The charges that Mr Sarao faces carry sentences totalling a maximum of 380 years.
80503517
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Volvo, which produces some of the safest cars in the world, is pledging that by 2020 no one will be killed or injured by a new vehicle it manufactures.
The Swedish manufacturer had no reported deaths in its XC90 in the US last year, showing that some of its cars are already preventing deaths on the road.
Volvo would like this statistic to be true for the whole range and not just the XC90, and with the development of new accident avoidance technologies, the Swedish car giant believes it can achieve this goal.
CEO of Volvo's North American division Lex Kressemakers said: "If you meet Swedish engineers, they're pretty genuine. They don't say things when they don't believe it."
New and more accurate safety technologies — such as collision avoidance, pedestrian detection and auto lane-keeping assist — would also help the development of autonomous cars, which some manufacturers, such as Volvo, are hoping to release by 2020.
80414795
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
If elected, presidential candidate Donald Trump plans to make Apple start "building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries." Trump's ultimatum to the most valuable company in the world was made towards the end of a 45-minute speech he gave at Liberty University in Virginia on Monday. The most popular candidate in the Republican party said he would impose a 35% business tax on American businesses manufacturing outside of the United States. Apple has manufactured its Mac Pro at a factory in Texas since 2013, but the vast majority of its products (including the iPhone) are largely made and assembled in China. How Trump would force Apple's supply chain, which relies heavily on a vast network of suppliers and large factories throughout Asia, to be brought stateside remains unknown. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently called the U.S. tax code "awful for America."
79405651
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
On Monday morning, Eric Jackson, manager of hedge fund SpringOwl, sent a brutal 99-page presentation to Yahoo's board, outlining his case for why the company should drop Marissa Mayer as CEO and find new management. Jackson points out that Yahoo has burned through $3 billion on M&A in the past three years since Mayer took the reins, which contributes to $10 billion in what Jackson calls Yahoo's misallocated capital. The value of all of those startups Yahoo has acquired, Jackson says, is worth nothing at Yahoo's current stock price. Jackson also points out that Yahoo has a history of buying up startups run by former Google APM members. While at Google, Mayer started the company's elite associate product-manager program. Of the 49 acquisitions Yahoo has made under Mayer's leadership, six were startups founded by ex-Googlers. The total cost of these six acquisitions is $319 million, according to Jackson's slide deck. Yahoo bought Polyvore in July for $230 million. Polyvore, a social commerce site that lets users make artistic collages of clothes and accessories...But Jackson does not mince words when it comes to Yahoo's decision to spend shareholder money acquiring Polyvore and companies like it.
"It's not acceptable to pay $230M for zombie companies run by former APM members," he says, pointing out that Polyvore had raised $22 million in VC funding, was 8 years old, and had gone through multiple pivots. For all intents and purposes, it looked like a goner until Yahoo bought it.
79274749
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
U.S. regulators are overhauling the process of assigning safety ratings to new vehicles by proposing requiring more crash-avoidance technologies to achieve a perfect score and adopting new crash-test dummies to assess performance. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Tuesday proposed revising the current ratings system from a single overall score of 1 to 5 into a multifaceted scorecard that would include the score on crash-avoidance systems and a mark for pedestrian safety. Currently, NHTSA ranks cars simply based on crash-worthiness. Five stars is a perfect rating. The number of deaths on U.S. roadways fell to a record-low, based on incidents per miles driven, of 32,675 fatalities in 2014. But an 8% uptick in deaths in the first half of 2015 fueled concern that progress on vehicle safety may have stalled. Under the current system, which hasn't been updated in several years, more than 90% of vehicles earn a rating of at least 4 stars.
74929441
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mrspoonsi writes:
Former Top Gear hosts Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have signed up to present a new show on Amazon's streaming video service. The trio will front three series of a new motoring programme for Amazon Prime, with the first season to be made available worldwide in 2016. The move follows their departure from the hit BBC Two show earlier this year. Clarkson's contract was not renewed following an "unprovoked physical attack" on a Top Gear producer. His co-hosts then followed him in leaving the show. They will now make the unnamed new programme with former Top Gear executive producer Andy Wilman, who also quit the BBC following the "fracas". In a statement from Amazon, Clarkson said: "I feel like I've climbed out of a biplane and into a spaceship."
74442299
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of a new particle called the pentaquark. It was first predicted to exist in the 1960s but, much like the Higgs boson particle before it, the pentaquark eluded science for decades until its detection at the LHC. The discovery, which amounts to a new form of matter, was made by the Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment. During the mid-2000s, several teams claimed to have detected pentaquarks, but their discoveries were subsequently undermined by other experiments. "There is quite a history with pentaquarks, which is also why we were very careful in putting this paper forward," Patrick Koppenburg, physics co-ordinator for LHCb at Cern, told BBC News. "It's just the word 'pentaquark' which seems to be cursed somehow because there have been many discoveries that were then superseded by new results that showed that previous ones were actually fluctuations and not real signals." LHCb spokesperson Guy Wilkinson commented: "The pentaquark is not just any new particle It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. The LHC powered up again in April following a two-year shutdown to complete a programme of repairs and upgrades.
71077695
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Companies that move their profits overseas to avoid tax will be subject to a "diverted profits tax" from April, the chancellor has said. In his final Budget before the election, George Osborne said firms that aid tax evasion will also face new penalties and criminal prosecutions. The so-called "Google Tax" is designed to discourage large companies diverting profits out of the the UK to avoid tax. "Let the message go out: this country's tolerance for those who will not pay their fair share of taxes has come to an end," Mr Osborne said. In 2012 it emerged that internet giant Google avoided tax on £10bn UK revenue in 2011 by doubling the amount of money put into a shell company in Bermuda. Doing so helped it avoid £1bn in corporation tax. Under the new tax regime, companies with an annual turnover of £10m will have to tell HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) if they think their company structure could make them liable for diverted profit tax. Once HMRC has assessed the structures, and decided how much profit has been artificially diverted from the UK, multinationals will have only 30 days to object to the 25% tax.
70336671
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Kim Dotcom's US lawyer has denied that a guilty plea by one of the Megaupload's former employees has major implications for his client's case. Andrus Nomm was sentenced to a year in jail after pleading guilty on Friday to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement while working for the now defunct file-sharing site. The US is currently trying to extradite Mr Dotcom, who founded Megaupload, from New Zealand to stand trial. Mr Dotcom denies wrongdoing. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has alleged that Megaupload's staff had "operated websites that wilfully reproduced and distributed infringing copies of copyrighted works" over a period of five years, causing more than $400m (£260m) of harm to copyright owners. Nomm — a 36-year-old Estonian citizen — agreed to this damages estimate as part of his plea, according to a press release from the DoJ. He had been living in the Netherlands before he travelled to Virginia to make the deal with the US authorities. The DoJ added that Nomm had acknowledged that through his work as a computer programmer for Megaupload, he had become aware of copyright-infringing material being stored on its sites, including films and TV shows that had contained FBI anti-piracy warnings. It said he had also admitted to having downloaded copyright-infringing files himself. "This conviction is a significant step forward in the largest criminal copyright case in US history," said assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell.
69940437
submission
mrspoonsi writes:
Apple announced it will spend about $2 billion to build a new data center in Mesa, Arizona. It will be housed in buildings formerly used by GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT), which went bankrupt last year after failing to supply sapphire display covers for the iPhone 6. the data center will be powered entirely by renewable energy. it will be a "command center for our global networks." Apple has said it would help find work for people affected by GTAT's bankruptcy. It's possible some of those former GTAT employees might help construct the new command center. When Apple initially partnered with GTAT to make sapphire displays, the company invested millions in a sapphire production facility. It makes sense that Apple would want to do something with the building if it couldn't make sapphire there.
