Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart)

The man behind the AllOfGarden.com blog wrote Tuesday that he has been granted a "total pardon"—as he described it in a four-stanza limerick.

Said blogger, Vincent "Vino" Malone, is the proprietor of AllOfGarden.com, a website that chronicles a quest to eat as much Olive Garden pasta as possible (via the Never Ending Pasta Pass).

Last week, Malone announced that he had received what appeared to be a legal demand e-mail from Darden, Olive Garden’s parent company, claiming alleged trademark infringement, because he used the phrase "Olive Garden" on his website. Malone ridiculed the demand in a response that he posted publicly, in which he accurately described the concept of "nominative fair use"—the trademark equivalent of fair use in copyright law.

(credit: fdecomite)

Police in Greece have arrested a man wanted in the United States for allegedly running a massive Bitcoin-based money laundering operation, according to the Associated Press. Authorities say the 38-year-old Russian man was responsible for converting $4 billion in illicit, conventional cash into virtual currency.

The suspect hasn't been publicly named, but Reuters got a picture of him being arrested. According to Reuters, he was arrested in the "Greek region of Chalkidiki on Monday on a US warrant."

The news is a reminder that—like ordinary cash—Bitcoin has a wide variety of uses, both legitimate and illicit. Bitcoin boosters like to focus on potential applications like international remittances, micropayments, and conventional retail sales. But Bitcoin has become the payment network of choice for "dark Web" markets for drugs and other illicit merchandise, from the original Silk Road—shut down in 2014—to the recently busted AlphaBay.

Enlarge / David Mikkelson, the founder of Snopes, seen here at the US Embassy in Vienna, in June 2017. (credit: US Embassy Vienna)

As of Tuesday evening, Snopes.com, one of the Internet’s most longstanding fact-checking websites, successfully raised over $600,000 in less than 48 hours—an effort to stay afloat while an ugly legal battle is underway.

Snopes’ founder, David Mikkelson, told Ars in a lengthy phone interview that a Web development company, Proper Media, and two of its founders have essentially held the website "hostage" for months, keeping both data and money that should have gone to Snopes’ parent company, Bardav.

Bardav and Proper Media, which also runs other websites including TVTropes.org, made a business deal together that Bardav then cancelled in March 2017. Proper Media sued in May, alleging breach of contract, among other allegations. Mikkelson and Bardav countersued in June 2017.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

All new petrol and diesel cars and vans will be banned from UK roads from 2040, the government will announce on Wednesday in a revised "controversial bomb" air pollution plan.

The Tory government published a draft air pollution plan in May, but it faced criticism from environment lawyers and clean air campaigners for being too floppy at curbing the nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution that causes thousands of premature deaths in the UK each year. The High Court demanded that a final version of the plan be published by the end of July—and so here we are.

In addition to following in France's footsteps with an internal combustion engine ban by 2040, the plan mostly focuses on empowering local councils to make major changes to their road systems. Reprogramming traffic lights, removing or redesigning speed bumps (!) and roundabouts, and retrofitting buses are all being mooted as possible ways of reducing air pollution.