An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to "triple your crypto," according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an "unauthorized message" that was sent via a "third-party system." TechCrunch has since confirmed that an undisclosed number of Betterment's customers have had their personal information accessed. "The company said customer names, email and postal addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth were compromised in the attack," reports TechCrunch.

Betterment said it detected the attack on the same day and "immediately revoked the unauthorized access and launched a comprehensive investigation, which is ongoing." The fintech firm also said it has reached out to the customers targeted by the hackers and "advised them to disregard the message."

"Our ongoing investigation has continued to demonstrate that no customer accounts were accessed and that no passwords or other log-in credentials were compromised," Betterment wrote in the email.

Warren Buffett is retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at age 95, ending a 55-year run that reshaped how generations of Americans think about investing. "The 95-year-old, often referred to as the 'Oracle of Omaha' and the 'billionaire next door,' will relinquish the title after a career that saw him turn a failing textile firm into one of the most successful asset managers in the world," reports NBC News. From the report: Greg Abel, the 63-year-old lesser-known CEO of Berkshire's energy business, will take the helm of the conglomerate on Thursday. Buffett will remain its chairman.

Under Buffett's leadership, Nebraska-based Berkshire has thrived at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, with investments in industries ranging from railroads and insurance to candy and ice cream.

Along the way, while living in the same house he bought for just over $30,000 in the late 1950s, he redefined investing for the American public with his folksy and practical advice, became one of the wealthiest people on Earth and dedicated much of that fortune to philanthropy. Berkshire's most significant tech bet was initiated in 2016 when it invested $1 billion. Apple has since become Berkshire Hathaway's largest single holding, representing over 20% of the portfolio and valued at more than $65 billion.

While Buffett largely avoided pure tech for decades, Buffett long considered technology a blind spot, famously saying "I wish I had" bought Apple earlier.

Throughout the years, Buffett expressed his disinterest in cryptocurrency and said he would "never own bitcoin," referring to it as "probably rat poison squared" and a "gambling token."

Two cybersecurity professionals who spent their careers defending organizations against ransomware attacks have pleaded guilty in a Florida federal court to using ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware to extort American businesses throughout 2023.

Ryan Goldberg, a 40-year-old incident response manager from Georgia, and Kevin Martin, a 36-year-old ransomware negotiator from Texas, admitted to conspiring to obstruct commerce through extortion. Between April and December 2023, Goldberg, Martin, and a third unnamed co-conspirator deployed the ransomware against multiple U.S. victims and agreed to pay ALPHV BlackCat's operators a 20% cut of any ransoms received. They successfully extracted approximately $1.2 million in Bitcoin from one victim, splitting their 80% share three ways before laundering the proceeds. Both men face up to 20 years in prison and are scheduled for sentencing on March 12, 2026.

The Justice Department noted that all three conspirators possessed specialized skills in securing computer systems against the very attacks they carried out. ALPHV BlackCat has targeted more than 1,000 victims globally and was the subject of an FBI disruption operation in December 2023 that saved victims an estimated $99 million through a custom decryption tool.

While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon -- roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated across several deals.

Wulf Compute, a subsidiary of Bitcoin-miner-turned-data-center-operator Terawulf, raised $3.2 billion in mid-October at 7.75%, well above the 5.5% average yield for similarly rated issuers. Cipher Compute sold $1.7 billion in early November at just over 7%. CoreWeave, which rents data centers and installs computing systems for companies like OpenAI and Meta, raised $1.75 billion in July at 9%. The company's bonds have since fallen to around 90 cents on the dollar, pushing the effective yield above 12% -- nearly double the average for companies at its single-B rating level.

"We just have to be much more pessimistic and not buy into the hype," said Will Smith, a portfolio manager at AllianceBernstein. Construction delays and uncertain demand for AI computing power remain key concerns for lenders who, unlike equity investors, have no upside beyond getting their principal back.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It's harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That's because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the artificial-intelligence boom. Some companies are figuring out how to remake themselves as vital suppliers to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and other "hyperscalers" bent on AI dominance.

Bitcoin-mining -- using vast computer power to solve equations to unlock the digital currency -- has been a lucrative and cutting-edge pursuit in its own right. Lately, however, increased competition and other challenges have eroded profit margins. But just as the bitcoin-mining business began to cool, the AI build-out turned white hot. The AI arms race has created an insatiable demand for some assets the miners already have: data centers, cooling systems, land and hard-to-obtain contracts for electrical power -- all of which can be repurposed to train and power AI models.

It's not a seamless process. Miners often have to build new, specialized facilities, because running AI requires more-advanced cooling and network systems, as well as replacing bitcoin-mining computers with AI-focused graphics processing units. But signing deals with miners allows AI giants to expand faster and cheaper than starting new facilities from scratch. These companies still mine some bitcoin, but the transition gives miners a new source of deep-pocketed customers willing to commit to longer-term leases for their data centers.

"The opportunity for miners to convert to AI is one of the greatest opportunities I could possibly imagine," said Adam Sullivan, chief executive of Core Scientific, which has pivoted to AI data centers. The shift has boosted miners' stocks. The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF has surged about 90% this year, a rally that has accelerated even as bitcoin erased its gains for 2025. The ETF holds shares of miners including Cipher Mining and IREN, both of which have surged following long-term deals with companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Shares of Core Scientific quadrupled in 2024 after the company signed its first AI contract that February. The stock has gained 10% this year. The company now expects to exit bitcoin mining entirely by 2028.

A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. "There's no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it's going to be really big regardless... In the end, everyone is paying the price for this," says Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who published his paper today in the journal Patterns. The Verge reports: To crunch these numbers, de Vries-Gao built on earlier research that found that power demand for AI globally could reach 23GW this year -- surpassing the amount of electricity used for Bitcoin mining in 2024. While many tech companies divulge total numbers for their carbon emissions and direct water use in annual sustainability reports, they don't typically break those numbers down to show how many resources AI consumes. De Vries-Gao found a work-around by using analyst estimates, companies' earnings calls, and other publicly available information to gauge hardware production for AI and how much energy that hardware likely uses.

Once he figured out how much electricity these AI systems would likely consume, he could use that to forecast the amount of planet-heating pollution that would likely create. That came out to between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons annually. For comparison, New York City emits around 50 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Data centers can also be big water guzzlers, an issue that's similarly tied to their electricity use. Water is used in cooling systems for data centers to keep servers from overheating. Power plants also demand significant amounts of water needed to cool equipment and turn turbines using steam, which makes up a majority of a data center's water footprint. The push to build new data centers for generative AI has also fueled plans to build more power plants, which in turn use more water and (and create more greenhouse gas pollution if they burn fossil fuels).

AI could use between 312.5 and 764.6 billion liters of water this year, according to de Vries-Gao. That reaches even higher than a previous study conducted in 2023 that estimates that water use could be as much as 600 billion liters in 2027. "I think that's the biggest surprise," says Shaolei Ren, one of the authors of that 2023 study and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. "[de Vries-Gao's] paper is really timely... especially as we are seeing increasingly polarized views about AI and water," Ren adds. Even with the higher projection for water use, Ren says de Vries-Gao's analysis is "really conservative" because it only captures the environmental effects of operating AI equipment -- excluding the additional effects that accumulate along the supply chain and at the end of a device's life.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant's $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMorgan will seed the fund with $100 million of its own capital, and then open it to outside investors on Tuesday. Called My OnChain Net Yield Fund, or "MONY," the private fund is supported by JPMorgan's tokenization platform, Kinexys Digital Assets, and will be open to qualified investors, or individuals with at least $5 million in investments and institutions with a minimum of $25 million. The fund has a $1 million investment minimum.

Wall Street has waded deeper into tokenization since the passage of the Genius Act earlier this year. The landmark measure, which establishes a regulatory framework for tokenized dollars known as stablecoins, has unleashed a wave of efforts to tokenize everything from stocks and bonds to funds and real assets. "There is a massive amount of interest from clients around tokenization," said John Donohue, head of global liquidity at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. "And we expect to be a leader in this space and work with clients to make sure that we have a product lineup that allows them to have the choices that we have in traditional money-market funds on blockchain."

The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said.

Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Do Kwon, the South Korean cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind two digital currencies that lost an estimated $40 billion in 2022, was sentenced in New York federal court on Thursday to 15 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. Kwon, 34, who co-founded Singapore-based Terraform Labs and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies, previously pleaded guilty and admitted to misleading investors about a coin that was supposed to maintain a steady price during periods of crypto market volatility.

Kwon was one of several cryptocurrency moguls to face federal charges after a slump in digital token prices in 2022 prompted the collapse of a number of companies. [...] Kwon was accused of misleading investors in 2021 about TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of $1. Prosecutors alleged that when TerraUSD slipped below its $1 peg in May 2021, Kwon told investors a computer algorithm known as "Terra Protocol" had restored the coin's value. Instead, Kwon arranged for a high-frequency trading firm to secretly buy millions of dollars of the token to artificially prop up its price, according to charging documents. "I made false and misleading statements about why it regained its peg by failing to disclose a trading firm's role in restoring that peg," Kwon said in court. "What I did was wrong."

He also faces charges in South Korea, and under his plea deal, prosecutors won't oppose his transfer abroad after he serves half of his U.S. sentence.

Michael Saylor's software company Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, built a financial model that some observers called an "infinite-money machine" by stockpiling hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and issuing stock and debt to buy more, but that machine appears to be breaking down. The company's stock peaked above $450 in mid-July and ended November at $177.18, a 60% decline. Bitcoin fell only 25% over the same period. The gap between Strategy's market cap and the value of its bitcoin holdings has nearly vanished.

At one point last week, the company's market value dipped below the value of its bitcoins after accounting for debt. Strategy announced it had built a $1.4 billion dollar reserve by selling more stock to cover required dividend payments to preferred shareholders over the next twelve months. The company also disclosed it might sell some of its coins if its value continues to fall, a reversal from Saylor's February tweet declaring "Never sell your Bitcoin." Professional short seller Jim Chanos, who had questioned the strategy's sustainability, told Sherwood he made money by shorting the stock and buying bitcoins.

The UK government plans to ban political donations made in cryptocurrency over fears of anonymity, foreign influence, and traceability issues, though the ban won't be ready in time for the upcoming elections bill. The Guardian reports: The government's ambition to ban crypto donations will be a blow to Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, which became the first to accept contributions in digital currency this year. It is believed to have received its first registrable donations in cryptocurrency this autumn and the party has set up its own crypto portal to receive contributions, saying it is subject to "enhanced" checks. Government sources have said ministers believe cryptocurrency donations to be a problem, as they are difficult to trace and could be exploited by foreign powers or criminals.

Pat McFadden, then a Cabinet Office minister, first raised the idea in July, saying: "I definitely think it is something that the Electoral Commission should be considering. I think that it's very important that we know who is providing the donation, are they properly registered, what are the bona fides of that donation." The Electoral Commission provides guidance on crypto donations but ministers accept any ban would probably have to come from the government through legislation. "Crypto donations present real risks to our democracy," said Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight on Corruption. "We know that bad actors like Russia use crypto to undermine and interfere in democracies globally, while the difficulties involved in tracing the true source of transactions means that British voters may not know everyone who's funding the parties they vote for."

Longtime Slashdot reader krouic shares a report from Europol: From November 24-28, 2025, Europol supported an action week conducted by law enforcement authorities from Switzerland and Germany in Zurich, Switzerland. The operation focused on taking down the illegal cryptocurrency mixing service Cryptomixer, which is suspected of facilitating cybercrime and money laundering. Three servers were seized in Switzerland, along with the cryptomixer.io domain. The operation resulted in the confiscation of over 12 terabytes of data and more than EUR 25 million worth of Bitcoin. After the illegal service was taken over and shut down, law enforcement placed a seizure banner on the website. Authorities allege that the mixing service laundered over 1.3 billion euros in bitcoin since 2016.

Texas has purchased $5 million worth of BlackRock's bitcoin ETF as an initial step toward creating the first state-level bitcoin reserve in the U.S. "[O]ther states having previously invested in such funds with public-employee retirement money," notes CoinDesk. "Michigan has been building such an investment, and Wisconsin sold its $350 million pension-fund stake in the BlackRock ETF in May. From the report: A few weeks ago, Texas moved past its deadline to "capture the industry's best practices so it can utilize these practices in the implementation and management" of its bitcoin BTC reserve, according to its formal request for information issued in September. Entities across the industry provided input on how it could set up and manage the stockpile conceived of in the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Investment Act.

Last week, the state comptroller's office moved to secure $5 million in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as a placeholder, a spokesman for the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts told CoinDesk on Tuesday. It's an opening move as the state continues to work toward a contract with a custodian, he said, which will take place after it develops its formal request for proposal.

A week ago Bitcoin was at $93,714. Saturday it dropped to $85,300.

Late Thursday, market researcher Ed Yardeni blamed some of Thursday's stock market sell-off on "the ongoing plunge in bitcoin's price," reports Fortune: "There has been a strong correlation between it and the price of TQQQ, an ETF that seeks to achieve daily investment results that correspond to three times (3x) the daily performance of the Nasdaq-100 Index," [Yardeni wrote in a note]. Yardeni blamed bitcoin's slide on the GENIUS Act, which was enacted on July 18, saying that the regulatory framework it established for stablecoins eliminated bitcoin's transactional role in the monetary system. "It's possible that the rout in bitcoin is forcing some investors to sell stocks that they own," he added... Traders who used leverage to make crypto bets would need to liquidate positions in the event of margin calls.

Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, also said bitcoin could swing the entire stock market, pointing out that it's become a proxy for speculation. "As a long-time systematic trader, it tells me that algorithms are acting upon the relationship between stocks and bitcoin," he wrote in a note on Thursday.

A magician who implanted an RFID chip in his hand lost access to it after forgetting the password, leaving him effectively locked out of the tech embedded in his own body. The Register reports: "It turns out," said [said magician Zi Teng Wang], "that pressing someone else's phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone's RFID reader is, really doesn't come off super mysterious and magical and amazing." Then there are the people who don't even have their phone's RFID reader enabled. Using his own phone would, in Zi's words, lack a certain "oomph."

Oh well, how about making the chip spit out a Bitcoin address? "That literally never came up either." In the end, Zi rewrote the chip to link to a meme, "and if you ever meet me in person you can scan my chip and see the meme." It was all suitably amusing until the Imgur link Zi was using went down. Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever, and there is no guarantee that a given link will work indefinitely. Indeed, access to Imgur from the United Kingdom was abruptly cut off on September 30 in response to the country's age verification rules.

Still, the link not working isn't the end of the world. Zi could just reprogram the chip again, right? Wrong. "When I went to rewrite the chip, I was horrified to realize I forgot the password that I had locked it with." The link eventually started working again, but if and when it stops, Zi's party piece will be a little less entertaining. He said: "Techie friends I've consulted with have determined that it's too dumb and simple to hack, the only way to crack it is to strap on an RFID reader for days to weeks, brute forcing every possible combination." Or perhaps some surgery to remove the offending hardware.

schwit1 shares a report from the New York Times: Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain's Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October. "Just bite your way out," he told them. It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border. A small group of investors had lined up in a conference room to have their hands bound with plastic zipties. Now they were learning how to get them off. "Your teeth will get through anything," Mr. Kayll advised. "But it will bloody well hurt."

Most people don't go to an international crypto conference expecting to learn how to gnaw through plastic. But after hours of panels devoted to topics like Bitcoin-collateralized loans, these investors were looking for something more practical. They wanted to know what to do if they were grabbed on the street and thrown into the back of a van. Already paranoid about scams, hacks and market turmoil, wealthy crypto investors have lately become terrified about a much graver threat: torture and kidnapping. These threats are known as "wrench attacks," which is a reference to a popular XKCD cartoon where a thief skips the hacking and just uses a wrench to force out the password.

According to the NYT, the best way to stay protected is staying low-profile, minimizing visible signs of wealth, using basic physical security tools, and preparing for self-defense. The report specifically recommends avoiding flashy displays of wealth like luxury watches and cars, watching for honey-traps, using hotel door stoppers, practicing escape techniques such as breaking zip-ties, hiring discreet bodyguards, and relying on panic-button apps like Glok to summon help quickly.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Harvard is ramping up its holdings in cryptocurrency. The nation's oldest university reported a $443 million investment in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust in the third quarter. The school now holds 6.8 million shares of the exchange-traded fund, up from 1.9 million in the second quarter.

The digital currency amounts to a little less than 1% of the school's $57 billion endowment. Other schools are bullish on crypto as well. Brown University reported holding $13 million of the BlackRock bitcoin ETF in the second quarter and Emory University reported holding $20 million of Grayscale's Bitcoin Mini Trust ETF as of March.

"Just a little more than a month after reaching an all-time high, Bitcoin has erased the more than 30% gain registered since the start of the year..." reports Bloomberg: The dominant cryptocurrency fell below US$93,714 on Sunday, pushing the price beneath the closing level reached at the end of last year, when financial markets were rallying following President Donald Trump's election victory. Bitcoin soared to a record US$126,251 on Oct 6, only to begin tumbling four days later after unexpected comments on tariffs by Trump sent markets into a tailspin worldwide. "The general market is risk-off," said Matthew Hougan, the San Francisco-based chief investment officer for Bitwise Asset Management. "Crypto was the canary in the coal mine for that, it was the first to flinch."

Over the past month, many of the biggest buyers — from exchange-traded fund allocators to corporate treasuries — have quietly stepped back, depriving the market of the flow-driven support that helped propel the token to records earlier this year. For much of the year, institutions were the backbone of Bitcoin's legitimacy and its price. ETFs as a cohort took in more than US$25 billion, according to Bloomberg data, pushing assets as high as roughly US$169 billion. Their steady allocation flows helped reframe the asset as a portfolio diversifier — a hedge against inflation, monetary debasement and political disarray. But that narrative — always tenuous — is fraying afresh, leaving the market exposed to something quieter but no less destabilising: disengagement. "The selloff is a confluence of profit-taking by LTHs, institutional outflows, macro uncertainty, and leveraged longs getting wiped out," said Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen. "What is clear is that the market has temporarily chosen a downward direction after a long period of consolidation/ranging..."

Boom and bust cycles have been a constant since Bitcoin burst into the mainstream consciousness with a more than 13,000% surge in 2017, only to be followed by a plunge of almost 75% the following year... Bitcoin has whipsawed investors through the year, dropping to as low as US$74,400 in April as Trump unveiled his tariffs, before rebounding to record highs ahead of the latest retreat... The market downturn has been even tougher on smaller, less liquid tokens that traders often gravitate toward because of their higher volatility and typical outperformance during rallies. A MarketVector index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets is down around 60% this year.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: [T]he computing power of crypto mining generates a lot of heat, most which just ends up vented into the air. According to digital assets brokerage, K33, the bitcoin mining industry generates about 100 TWh of heat annually — enough to heat all of Finland.This energy waste within a very energy-intense industry is leading entrepreneurs to look for ways to repurpose the heat for homes, offices, or other locations, especially in colder weather months.

During a frigid snap earlier this year, The New York Times reviewed HeatTrio, a $900 space heater that also doubles as a bitcoin mining rig. Others use the heat from their own in-home cryptocurrency mining to spread warmth throughout their house. "I've seen bitcoin rigs running quietly in attics, with the heat they generate rerouted through the home's ventilation system to offset heating costs. It's a clever use of what would otherwise be wasted energy," said Jill Ford, CEO of Bitford Digital, a sustainable bitcoin mining company based in Dallas... "Same price as heating the house, but the perk is that you are mining bitcoin," Ford said...

The crypto-heated future may be unfolding in the town of Challis, Idaho, where Cade Peterson's company, Softwarm, is repurposing bitcoin heat to ward off the winter. Several shops and businesses in town are experimenting with Softwarm's rigs to mine and heat. At TC Car, Truck and RV Wash, Peterson says, the owner was spending $25 a day to heat his wash bays to melt snow and warm up the water. "Traditional heaters would consume energy with no returns. They installed bitcoin miners and it produces more money in bitcoin than it costs to run," Peterson said. Meanwhile, an industrial concrete company is offsetting its $1,000 a month bill to heat its 2,500-gallon water tank by heating it with bitcoin. Peterson has heated his own home for two-and-a-half years using bitcoin mining equipment and believes that heat will power almost everything in the future. "You will go to Home Depot in a few years and buy a water heater with a data port on it and your water will be heated with bitcoin," Peterson said.
Derek Mohr, clinical associate professor at the University of Rochester Simon School of Business, remains skeptical. Bitcoin mining is so specialized now that a home computer, or even network of home computers, would have almost zero chance of being helpful in mining a block of bitcoin, according to Mohr, with mining farms use of specialized chips that are created to mine bitcoin much faster than a home computer... "The bitcoin heat devices I have seen appear to be simple space heaters that use your own electricity to heat the room..."
CNBC also spoke to Andrew Sobko, founder of Argentum AI (which is building a marketplace for sharing computing power), who says the idea makes the most sense in larger settings. "We're working with partners who are already redirecting compute heat into building heating systems and even agricultural greenhouse warming. That's where the economics and environmental benefits make real sense. Instead of trying to move the heat physically, you move the compute closer to where that heat provides value."

A massive cyberattack on Swedish IT supplier Miljodata exposed personal data from up to 1.5 million citizens, prompting a national privacy investigation and scrutiny into security failures across multiple municipalities. BleepingComputer reports: MiljÃdata is an IT systems supplier for roughly 80% of Sweden's municipalities. The company disclosed the incident on August 25, saying that the attackers stole data and demanded 1.5 Bitcoin to not leak it. The attack caused operational disruptions that affected citizens in multiple regions in the country, including Halland, Gotland, Skelleftea, Kalmar, Karlstad, and Monsteras.

Because of the large impact, the state monitored the situation from the time of disclosure, with CERT-SE and the police starting to investigate immediately. According to IMY, the attacker exposed on the dark web data that corresponds to 1.5 million people in the country, creating the basis for investigating potential General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) violations. [...] Although no ransomware groups had claimed the attack when Miljodata disclosed the incident, BleepingComputer found that the threat group Datacarry posted the stolen data on its dark web portal on September 13. The leaked database has been added to Have I Been Pwned, which contains information such as names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, government IDs, and dates of birth.