Tyler Barriss, the California man authorities say was behind a wave of “swatting” incidents, has pleaded guilty to a total of 51 federal charges and will receive a minimum of 20 years in prison if his plea deal is approved by the judge in the case, the AP reported on Tuesday.
Dutch police say they have “decrypted more than 258,000 messages” sent using an expensive chat service, Ars Technica reported on Wednesday, citing a National Police Corps statement that claimed authorities in the Netherlands have achieved a “breakthrough in the interception and decryption of encrypted communication…
Why would anyone fake their own death? Some seek a departure from royalty, a career as a pirate, or a quiet life after taking down the Third Reich. Usually, they’re chasing an escape from bankruptcy or bad marriages. But for some, it may seem that staging their own death is the only way to feel like they’re alive.
On Thursday, a 45-year-old man wielding a hammer reportedly smashed through a glass screen protecting one of only four copies of the original Magna Carta. The incident, which predictably has a lot of people making National Treasure jokes, happened at Salisbury Cathedral in the UK. The man, who is not Nicolas Cage, is…
All across the country this week, pipe bombs have been showing up in the mail of prominent Democrats and critics of Donald Trump—with NBC News listing former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Maxine Waters, billionaire philanthropist George…
Staff discovered what appeared to be an explosive device in a mailbox at the Westchester County, New York home of billionaire George Soros on Monday, the New York Times reported, with a police bomb squad later destroying the device.
Genetic testing has helped plenty of people gain insight into their ancestry, and some services even help users find their long-lost relatives. But a new study published this week in Science suggests that the information uploaded to these services can be used to figure out your identity, regardless of whether you…
The Seattle Police Department launched a program this week to let the public notify them they could be potential victims of a “swatting” hoax, according to Ars Technica.
A joint federal-state task force tracking the MS-13 gang tried and failed to force Facebook to help it wiretap calls made through its Messenger app, Reuters reported on Friday, even launching an unsuccessful attempt to hold the social media titan in contempt of court for refusing to do so.
Getting into the FBI is not easy, as the agency’s new “Do you have what it takes?” fitness app will happily tell you. The app, which was released in August 2018, walks users through the five legs of the fitness requirements former director James Comey re-implemented in 2015—daring them to achieve high scores on…
Amazon is reportedly investigating whether independent merchants operating on their platform are greasing the palms of staff to divulge confidential information about the site, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
A few years ago, a man named Paul Ceglia filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, claiming that the two signed a software development contract in 2003 with provisions conveniently giving Ceglia retroactive co-ownership of the site. Authorities later alleged that Ceglia, an upstate New…
Chinese ridesharing service Didi Chuxing has suspended Hitch, its free/tip-supported carpooling component that allows passengers to ride along with drivers headed in the same direction, after the second murder of a passenger this year.
In what might be one of the least shocking revelations ever, the authors of two recently published papers accuse tobacco companies of further dishonesty (you know, besides decades-long attempts to downplay the addictiveness of cigarettes). They allege the tobacco industry has been scheming to take over an…
A 29-year-old airline employee “thought to be suicidal” stole a 76-seat Q400 turboprop plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) on Friday night, eventually crashing some 30 miles away with fighter jets on his tail, the New York Times reported. Local authorities confirmed he is dead.
This week, 47-year-old Christopher Kruithof filed a complaint against the FBI, alleging that the federal law enforcement agency was blocking his phone after he viewed child pornography on it. They weren’t—police reportedly chalked it up to a ransomware virus.
A Lexington, Kentucky man was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on Monday, the Department of Justice wrote in a press release, for a data heist in which he abused his status as an employee of online polling company IntelliSurvey Inc. to snatch up nearly half a million dollars in unclaimed Amazon gift cards.
Dozens of defendants were sentenced to prison on a wealth of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges relating to a complex call center scheme operating from India, the Department of Justice announced on Monday. A ring of scammers operating both in India and the U.S. coerced victims, the DoJ says, into…
The execution of twice-convicted killer Scott Raymond Dozier in Nevada on Wednesday was postponed after pharmaceutical company Alvogen requested a federal judge prevent officials from botching an execution with their drug midazolam.
Kim Dotcom, the former founder of defunct file hosting service Megaupload and its successor Mega, just lost another court battle to avoid extradition to the US on charges of copyright infringement and fraud.
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