Month: November 2020

(credit: BTC Keychain)

On Wednesday, Ars reported that someone had transferred close to $1 billion in bitcoin out of a wallet likely associated with the Silk Road crime bazaar. Now we know who that mystery party is: the US Department of Justice, which in 2013 shut down Silk Road and went on to put its founder, Ross Ulbricht, behind bars for life.

“The successful prosecution of Silk Road’s founder in 2015 left open a billion-dollar question. Where did the money go?” US Attorney David Anderson said in a news release, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Today’s forfeiture complaint answers this open question at least in part. $1 billion of these criminal proceeds are now in the United States’ possession.”

Silk Road and Ulbricht were among the most popular and successful online crime figures in Internet history. Hosted on the anonymous Dark Web, the service brought together sellers and buyers of drugs, fake IDs, and just about any other kind of illicit good or service imaginable. There were thousands of dealers and "well over 100,000 buyers," US attorneys wrote in a civil complaint filed on Thursday. The complaint said that Silk Road generated revenue of over 9.5 million Bitcoin and collected commissions from these sales of more than 600,000 Bitcoin.

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At Wilamaya Patjxa, an archaeological site in southern Peru, archaeologists unearthed the skeleton of a young woman whose people buried her with a hunters’ toolkit, including projectile points. The find prompted University of California Davis archaeologist Randall Haas and his colleagues to take a closer look at other Pleistocene and early Holocene hunters from around the Americas.

Their results may suggest that female hunters weren’t as rare as we thought. And that, in turn, reminds us that gender roles haven’t always been the same in every culture.

The hunter of Wilamaya Patjxa

“The objects that accompany [people] in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life,” Haas and his colleagues wrote. And when one young woman died 9,000 years ago in what is now southern Peru, her people buried her with at least six stone spear tips of a type used in hunting large prey like deer and vicuña (a relative of the alpaca). The points seem to have been bundled along with a stone knife, sharp stone flakes, scraping tools, and ocher for tanning hides.

Enlarge / "Remember, remember the fifth of November": a 1997 Bonfire Night in Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, England, commemorating Guy Fawkes and The Conspiracy of the Powders plot to blow up the English Parliament and King James I. (credit: Teesside Archive/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

Tonight, people in Great Britain will celebrate Guy Fawkes Day with bonfires and elaborate fireworks displays across the country, which is why it's also known as Bonfire Night. The downside of the festivities is that the combination temporarily pours a lot of extra particulates into the air. This is known to have an adverse effect on visibility, but scientists also suspected that elevated levels of soot that accumulates from the annual bonfires could contribute to creating ice in clouds. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere, this doesn't seem to be the case.

For those not familiar with this British celebration, Guy Fawkes was a member of the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, whose Catholic members conspired to blow up the British House of Lords in an attempt to assassinate the Protestant King James I. Fawkes was caught guarding the cache of explosives, and the public celebrated the king's survival by lighting bonfires. Fawkes and his fellow conspirators were executed the following January. Just days before the executions, Parliament passed the Observance of 5th November Act (aka the "Thanksgiving Act"), making the day an annual celebration.

Originally marked by extreme anti-Catholic sentiment, the nature of the celebrations evolved over the centuries. It eventually became common practice to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy—a practice memorably depicted in the climax of a season 3 episode of the BBC's Sherlock Holmes series ("The Empty Hearse"), in which Holmes and Watson foil a modern-day plot to finish what the Gunpowder Plot had started.

Enlarge / Uber signs are seen August 20, 2020 at Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles, California. - Rideshare service rivals Uber and Lyft were given a temporary reprieve on August 20 from having to reclassify drivers as employees in their home state of California by August 21. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images) (credit: Robyn Beck | Getty Images)

California voters’ decision to let Uber and other gig economy companies continue to treat their workers as independent contractors has dealt a crushing blow to campaigners and legislators and paved the way for the companies to remake labour laws across the US.

Voters in the state overwhelmingly approved Proposition 22 on Tuesday, exempting the companies from a new employment law passed last year. As a result, drivers in the state will not be classed as employees but can draw upon limited healthcare provisions and will earn a minimum rate of pay.

The victory paves the way for similar legislation to be put in place across the US where, according to research from the investment bank Cowen, as many as 17 states are considering how to regulate the gig economy.