Month: February 2022

Five electric SUVs by 2026 are key to Lincoln’s future

Its first BEV is due this year.

So far, this is as much detail about its first battery EV as Lincoln has teased us with.

Enlarge / So far, this is as much detail about its first battery EV as Lincoln has teased us with. (credit: Lincoln)

Lincoln has been Ford's luxury brand for almost exactly a century now—the Blue Oval bought the Lincoln Motor Company from Henry Leland on February 4, 1922. Now the brand is getting ready for its next century with a raft of new battery-electric SUVs due between now and 2026, according to Reuters.

Last June, Lincoln announced that it would become a fully battery-electric brand by 2030. It's a no-brainer for the automaker, given how well electric motors—with instantaneous torque and near-silent operation—are suited to luxury vehicles.

At the time, Lincoln announced that its first fully electric model would arrive in 2022, in both rear- and all-wheel-drive configurations. Although we haven't seen any renderings or spy shots of this first Lincoln battery EV, Occam's razor suggests it will be built on the same platform as Ford's Mustang Mach-E crossover.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Übergriff in Berlin: Maskenstreit oder Rassismus?

Trau, schau, wem: Ein Angriff in der Bundeshauptstadt muss neu bewertet werden. Das hat viel mit medialer Präsentation zu tun. Und mit nötiger Medienkritik

Trau, schau, wem: Ein Angriff in der Bundeshauptstadt muss neu bewertet werden. Das hat viel mit medialer Präsentation zu tun. Und mit nötiger Medienkritik

$3.6 billion bitcoin seizure shows how hard it is to launder cryptocurrency

A “laundry list” of technical measures to cover wrongdoers’ tracks didn’t work.

The IRS detailed the winding and tangled routes the couple allegedly took to launder a portion of the nearly 120,000 bitcoins stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.

Enlarge / The IRS detailed the winding and tangled routes the couple allegedly took to launder a portion of the nearly 120,000 bitcoins stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016. (credit: William Whitehurst | Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan were arrested in New York and accused of laundering a record $4.5 billion worth of stolen cryptocurrency. In the 24 hours immediately afterward, the cybersecurity world ruthlessly mocked their operational security screwups: Lichtenstein allegedly stored many of the private keys controlling those funds in a cloud-storage wallet that made them easy to seize, and Morgan flaunted her “self-made” wealth in a series of cringe-inducing rap videos on YouTube and Forbes columns.

But those gaffes have obscured the remarkable number of multi-layered technical measures that prosecutors say the couple did use to try to dead-end the trail for anyone following their money. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that federal agents, led by IRS Criminal Investigations, managed to defeat those alleged attempts at financial anonymity on the way to recouping $3.6 billion of stolen cryptocurrency. In doing so, they demonstrated just how advanced cryptocurrency tracing has become—potentially even for coins once believed to be practically untraceable.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments