"Uber has officially accepted responsibility for hiding a 2016 data breach that exposed the data of 57 million passengers and drivers..." reports Engadget.

Reuters explains this acknowledgement "was part of a settlement with U.S. prosecutors to avoid criminal charges." In entering a non-prosecution agreement, Uber admitted that its personnel failed to report the November 2016 hacking to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission [for nearly one year], even though the agency had been investigating the ride-sharing company's data security... U.S. Attorney Stephanie Hinds in San Francisco said the decision not to criminally charge Uber reflected new management's prompt investigation and disclosures, and Uber's 2018 agreement with the FTC to maintain a comprehensive privacy program for 20 years.

The San Francisco-based company is also cooperating with the prosecution of a former security chief, Joseph Sullivan, over his alleged role in concealing the hacking.
Here's what the Department of Justice is now alleging against that security chief (as summarized by Reuters last month: "he arranged to pay money to two hackers in exchange for their silence, while trying to conceal the hacking from passengers, drivers and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission."

That's led to three separate wire fraud charges against the former security chief, as well as two charges for obstruction of justice. The defendant was originally indicted in September 2020, and is believed to be the first corporate information security officer criminally charged with concealing a hacking. Prosecutors said Sullivan arranged to pay the hackers $100,000 in bitcoin, and have them sign nondisclosure agreements that falsely stated they had not stolen data.

Uber had a bounty program designed to reward security researchers who report flaws, not to cover up data thefts.... In September 2018, the San Francisco-based company paid $148 million to settle claims by all 50 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. that it was too slow to reveal the hacking.

"Record-breaking heat across Texas has pushed its fragile power grid to the brink," reports NBC News. "But extreme temperatures are doing something else in the famously pro-business state: stirring opposition to energy-guzzling crypto miners who've flocked there seeking low-cost energy and a deregulatory stance."

Ten industrial-scale crypto miners will consume an estimated 18 gigawatts in years to come — though the state's current capacity is around 80 gigawatts (though it's expected to grow).

The case against them? The energy crypto miners use puts "an almost unprecedented burden" on the Texas grid, according to Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of Grid Edge, a unit of Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm. Mining "pushes the system closer to dangerous system peaks at all times," he told NBC News. "It is completely inessential and consuming physical resources, time and money that should be going to decarbonize and strengthen the grid...."

Unlike other electricity systems, the Texas grid does not connect to other states' grids; that means it cannot receive power from other areas in emergencies. Because of their high demand for electricity, crypto miners raise costs for other consumers of power, Hertz-Shargel said. And, on the Texas grid, miners can get paid for powering down during peak demand periods, like the one that recently hit the state. Miners and other industrial customers with these types of arrangements receive revenues for not using electricity; the costs of those revenues are passed on to other electricity customers.... During peak periods, miners can also resell to the grid the electricity they would otherwise have used. Because their contracts can let them buy power at low cost, energy resales when demand is high can generate significant financial benefits in the form of credits against future use....

Electricity customers across the state will cover those credits, said Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "Ratepayers in Texas are going to be paying it off a little bit every month for decades," Dessler said. "It angers me so much."
But Lee Bratcher, founder of the Texas Blockchain Council, makes the case for industrial-scale bitcoin mines: Bratcher and the crypto miners he represents say they provide three benefits to Texas. Because they can turn off their electricity use during high-demand periods, they can help stabilize the grid and rein in runaway power prices. "Power pricing is set off at peaks and the miners are specifically trying to turn off during peaks," he said. In addition, crypto miners' 24/7 demand for electricity can provide an incentive for wind and solar developers to bring more green power to the grid while new jobs and tax revenues "lead to orders of magnitude of human flourishing in communities where the mines set up," Bratcher said.
Still, 800 locals have signed a petition against plans to built America's largest bitcoin-mining facility — a facility which will consume 1.4 million gallons of water a day and 1 gigawatt of electricity (enough to power 200,000 homes). Jackie Sawicky, a small-business owner, is organizing the opposition to the Riot facility. "There are over 7,000 people in poverty and 8,000 seniors living on fixed incomes here," she told NBC News. "We cannot afford increased water costs and electricity."

According to a 2020 economic impact report commissioned by the Rockdale Municipal Development District, an entity run by area businesspeople, the facility will deliver an estimated $28.5 million in economic benefits to the community over 10 years. The operation employs "nearly 200 full-time benefited employees..."

The founders and partners of crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, have broken their silence on just how they lost billions of dollars they borrowed from other firms. From a report: Su Zhu and Kyle Davies attribute 3AC's collapse to over-exposure to Terra, staked Ethereum, and Grayscale's Bitcoin trust. Zhu said in the case of Terra, he initially didn't see any red flags: "What we failed to realize was that Luna was capable of falling to effective zero in a matter of days and that this would catalyze a credit squeeze across the industry that would put significant pressure on all of our illiquid positions."

"We began to know Do Kwon on a personal basis as he moved to Singapore," said Zhu. "And we just felt like the project was going to do very big things, and had already done very big things. If we could have seen that, you know, that this was now like, potentially like attackable in some ways, and that it had grown too, you know, too big, too fast." Another popular trade among the ailing crypto companies was staked Ethereum, or stETH. Every stETH will in theory be redeemable for one Ethereum after the network migrates to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism in September. However, one of the knock-on effects of Terra's collapse was that stETH began to miss its peg. This attracted opportunistic traders to bet against the token: "Because Luna just happened, it was very much a contagion where people were like, 'OK, are there people who are also leveraged long staked Ether versus Ether who will get liquidated as the market goes down?' So the whole industry kind of effectively hunted these positions, thinking that, you know, that because it could be hunted essentially." Zhu also attributed 3AC's collapse to exposure to Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), an investment product for institutional investors who want exposure to Bitcoin without the risks of directly holding it. GBTC is currently trading at a 30% discount to BTC.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp has likely advanced its production technology by two generations, defying US sanctions intended to halt the rise of China's largest chipmaker. From a report: The Shanghai-based manufacturer is shipping Bitcoin-mining semiconductors built using 7-nanometer technology, industry watcher TechInsights wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. That's well ahead of SMIC's established 14nm technology, a measure of fabrication complexity in which narrower transistor widths help produce faster and more efficient chips. Since late 2020, the US has barred the unlicensed sale to the Chinese firm of equipment that can be used to fabricate semiconductors of 10nm and beyond, infuriating Beijing.

A person familiar with the developments confirmed the report, asking not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. SMIC's surprising progress raises questions about how effective export controls have been and whether Washington can indeed thwart China's ambition to foster a world-class chip industry at home and reduce reliance on foreign technologies. It also comes at a time American lawmakers have urged Washington to close loopholes in its Chinese-oriented curbs and ensure Beijing isn't supplying crucial technology to Russia. The restrictions effectively derailed Huawei Technologies's smartphone business by cutting it off from the tools to compete at the cutting edge -- but that company is now quietly staffing up a renewed effort to develop its in-house chipmaking acumen.

Cryptocurrency exchange Blockchain.com is cutting 25% of its workforce, equating to about 150 people, the firm said on Thursday. CoinDesk reports: The company cited the harsh bear market conditions and the need to absorb financial losses. The exchange recently revealed it was dealing with a $270 million shortfall from lending to beleaguered hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. Blockchain.com said it will close its Argentina-based offices and cancel team expansion plans in several countries. Some 44% of the affected employees are in Argentina, 26% in the U.S., 16% in the U.K. and the rest in other countries, the company said. The reduction brings the firm's staffing back to January levels, a representative told CoinDesk via email.

Blockchain.com has expanded rapidly in the past 16 months, growing from 150 employees to more than 600. Blockchain.com, which is one of the oldest firms in the crypto industry, is also shrinking its institutional lending business, halting all mergers and acquisitions, placing a pause on efforts to expand gaming and slowing its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace. The firm said its most active demand was coming from Europe, the U.S. and Africa, as opposed to Latin America. It also said it was receiving more demand from brokerage, rather than gaming.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is working to get some cryptolending companies properly registered if they operate more as investment firms, the head of the Wall Street regulator told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. From a report: SEC Chair Gary Gensler also said it was up to large financial institutions to decide whether they want to include crypto options in their portfolios for clients, but that the risks of crypto tokens need to be made public.

"We have focused on this area because many of these firms...may well be investment companies taking hundreds of thousands or millions of customers funds, pulling it together, and then relending it while offering pretty high returns. Sounds a little like an investment company, or a bank, you might say," Gensler said. "How are they doing that? What stands behind those promises? We're going to work with the industry to get these firms properly registered under the securities laws."

Zipmex, a Singapore-based digital assets trading platform, today announced that it is pausing customer withdrawals. From a report: The company took to Twitter on Wednesday to announce the move, citing "a combination of circumstances beyond our control" that made it take the decision. "Due to a combination of circumstances beyond our control including volatile market conditions, and the resulting financial difficulties of our key business partners, to maintain the integrity of our platform, we would be pausing withdrawals until further notice," said the exchange.

Zipmex, which markets itself as "Asia's leading digital assets exchange" and has offices in Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia, offers a variety of products including cryptocurrency spot trading and interest-bearing accounts. According to the company's website, users can enjoy up to 10% in rewards per year by depositing their funds on the platform. For example, Zipmex claims to offer 6% returns on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH), and 10% on the USDC stablecoin. The startup, which counts Eduardo Saverin's B Capital as an investor, had concluded a $52 million fundraise in March this year.

India'a central bank wants to ban cryptocurrencies, the government told the parliament on Monday, raising more uncertainty about the future of the nascent virtual digital asset in the world's second largest internet market. From a report: Nirmala Sitharaman, the minister of finance in India, said the Reserve Bank of India has expressed concerns about the "destabilising effect of cryptocurrencies on the monetary and fiscal stability of a country" and has recommended "for framing of legislation on this sector," she said. "RBI is of the view that cryptocurrencies should be prohibited," she added. Formulating any legislation for regulation or banning of crypto will require "significant international collaboration," she added.

The world has changed since China banned cryptomining, the Guardian reports. And now "more than a third of the global computing power dedicated to mining bitcoin comes from the US, Senator Elizabeth Warren and five other Democrats reported in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency..."

But the Guardian also notes there's two problems with this: - The largest US cryptomining companies have the capacity to use as much electricity as nearly every home in Houston, Texas; energy use that is contributing to rising utility bills, according to an investigation by Democratic lawmakers...

- "The results of our investigation ... are disturbing ... revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant — and rapidly growing — amount of carbon emissions," the letter states.

"It is imperative that your agencies work together to address the lack of information about cryptomining's energy use and environmental impacts." The congressional Democrats have asked the EPA and the Department of Energy to require cryptominers to disclose emissions and energy use, noting that regulators know little about the full environmental impact of the industry....

The power demands of the industry are also coming at a cost to consumers, the letter states, citing a study that found cryptomining operations in upstate New York led to a rise in electric bills by roughly $165m for small businesses and $79m for individuals.
The main operator of Texas's grid admitted this week to the Verge that by 2026 crypto mining is set to increase demand on the state's power grid by a whopping 27 gigawatts — or nearly a third of the grid's current maximum capacity.

And an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology with a background in electricity system policy warns the site that "The more crypto mining that comes into the state, the higher the residents should expect the electricity prices to become."

Slashdot reader storagedude writes: The first signs of the ransomware attack at data storage vendor Spectra Logic were reports from a number of IT staffers about little things going wrong at the beginning of the day. Matters steadily worsened within a very short time and signs of a breach became apparent. Screens then started to display a ransom demand, which said files had been encrypted by the NetWalker ransomware virus. The ransom demand was $3.6 million, to be paid in bitcoin within five days.

Tony Mendoza, Senior Director of Enterprise Business Solutions at Spectra Logic, laid out the details of the attack at the annual Fujifilm Recording Media USA Conference in San Diego late last month, as reported by eSecurity Planet.

"We unplugged systems, as the virus was spreading faster than we could investigate," Mendoza told conference attendees. "As we didn't have a comprehensive cybersecurity plan in place, the attack brought the entire business to its knees."

To make matters worse, the backup server had also been wiped out, but with the help of recovery specialist Ankura, uncorrupted snapshots and [offline] tape backups helped the company get back online in days, although full recovery took a month.

"We were able to restore everything and paid nothing," said Mendoza. "Other than a few files, all data was recovered."

The attack, which started from a successful phishing attempt, "took us almost a month to fully recover and get over the ransomware pain," said Mendoza.

"Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a law Friday prohibiting the use of digital assets as forms of payments in Russia..." reports the tech/policy news site Protocol. The ban on crypto-form payments also apparently applies to NFTs: The new law also includes a provision that requires crypto exchanges and providers refuse transactions in which digital assets could be construed as a form of payment... The new law is set to take effect in 10 days.

There's been some speculation that sanctioned Russian companies or individuals might use crypto to avoid sanctions imposed after the country's invasion of Ukraine. But officials have proven savvy in using on-chain analytics to trace transactions, and industry experts have warned that sanctions evaders would be ill-served by trying to use cryptocurrencies. U.S. and EU bodies have even added specific crypto wallet addresses to sanction lists.

NFT marketplace OpenSea announced today that it's laying off around 20% of the company's employees. TechCrunch reports: "... [T]he reality is that we have entered an unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability, and we need to prepare the company for the possibility of a prolonged downturn," OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said in a message shared with staff that he posted publicly on Twitter as well. The company did not specify exactly how many employees were impacted by the decision, but the company's LinkedIn page indicates the company has around 750+ employees currently. Finzer says that impacted employees will be receiving severance and health insurance "into 2023" as well as accelerated equity vesting.

The layoffs raise questions about the company's aggressive growth tactics and how they approached the sustainability of the NFT sector's breakneck growth. In his note to staff, Finzer says the company has years of runway ahead of it with these changes, assuming things don't get even bleaker. "The changes we're making today put us in a position to maintain multiple years of runway under various crypto winter scenarios (5 years at the current volume), and give us high confidence that we will only have to go through this process once," Finzer writes, later adding, "Winter is our time to build."

According to CNBC, embattled crypto company Celsius is in the process of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. From the report: The company's lawyers were notifying individual U.S. state regulators as of Wednesday evening, according to the source, who asked not to be named because the proceedings were private. Celsius plans to file the paperwork "imminently," the person said. The Hoboken, New Jersey-based company made headlines a month ago after freezing customer accounts, blaming "extreme market conditions."

The company was one of the largest players in the crypto lending space with more than $8 billion in loans to clients, and almost $12 billion in assets under management as of May. Celsius said it had 1.7 million customers as of June and was competing with its interest-bearing accounts and yields as high as 17%. The firm would lend customers' crypto out to counterparties willing to pay a sky-high interest rate to borrow it. Celsius would then split some of that revenue with users. But the structure came crashing down amid a liquidity crunch in the industry. "Unfortunately, this was expected. It was anticipated. It does not, however, stop our investigations. We will continue investigating the company and working to protect its clients, even through its insolvency," Joseph Rotunda, director of enforcement at the Texas State Securities Board, said of the Celsius bankruptcy filing.

Sri Lanka has warned its citizens against using cryptocurrency, which it said is "largely unregulated" amid an ongoing political chaos in the South Asian nation. From a report: The country's central bank, CBSL, said Tuesday it does not consider cryptocurrencies as legal tender in the country and reminded that it has not given license or other authorization to any entity to operate in the nation. [...] The warning comes at a time when the sovereign-debt crisis has crippled the local economy. The South Asian nation, which fell into default in May this year and is struggling to secure essential imports from other nations, reported that inflation had touched a year-on-year record of 54.6 percent in June.

GameStop on Monday announced the long-awaited debut of its online marketplace for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in a bid to reinvent its business and cash in on consumer adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. CNBC reports: The platform, which is now open to the public for beta testing, allows users to connect their own digital asset wallets, including the recently launched GameStop Wallet, the company said in a press release. They will then be able to buy, sell and trade NFTs of virtual goods. Over time, the marketplace will expand to offer other features such as Web3 gaming, GameStop said. "Currently, the marketplace plays host to an array of artwork projects that run on the Ethereum mainnet as well as Loopring, a layer-2 scaling solution," adds Decrypt. "GameStop previously announced a partnership to use the Immutable X layer-2 scaling network, but the marketplace notes that Immutable X support is 'coming soon.'"

"GameStop and Immutable X launched a $100 million token grant fund to bring game developers onto the marketplace. A press release notes that gaming NFTs will be added in the future."

Further reading: Game Developer On 'Why NFTs Are a Nightmare'

Game developer Mark Venturelli received a spirited ovation at Brazil's International Games Festival on Friday after he surprised the audience for his "Future of Game Design" talk with a new title: "Why NFTs are a nightmare." PC Gamer reports: Venturelli, who is best known for the game Chroma Squad, didn't just push back against those talks by calling NFTs a nightmare: He argued in detail that they're bad for gaming and run directly counter to his vision for the future of game design. In a follow-up interview with PC Gamer, Venturelli said the event's blockchain sponsors needed "to buy their relevance, because they're not relevant." [...] NFT projects in particular quickly became savvy enough to use phrases like "environment-friendly technology" in their press releases, but none of them grapple with the deeper criticisms of their ideas. That's what Venturelli zeroed in on in his talk and in our follow-up interview. There's the uncanny resemblance between these profit-driven grifts and pyramid schemes, but there's also the philosophical concern that things like cryptocurrency represent a libertarian ideal founded in paranoia about institutions, and about other human beings. That, Venturelli says, is in part why they're so inefficient in the first place.

"Computationally, like in real life, if you don't trust the people that you're working with, you have to spend a lot more energy to achieve the same things," he says. "If I'm living with you in the same house and we don't trust each other, I have to, every time before I leave my house, hide my valuables. I have to make inventory of the things that I own, and maybe put cameras or locks inside of things. When I come back home I need to check everything and see if you messed with any of my stuff, and make sure that you don't get into my room when I'm sleeping and all that shit. It's so much energy that I have to use just to exist in a room with you, because I don't trust you. That, I feel, is a very good metaphor about how computationally blockchain works, and what is the underlying philosophical idea behind it, which is, 'We want a world without any sort of centralized authority because we cannot trust any of them ever.' And that is the opposite of what we want as a society, in my opinion." [...]

Investors see potential value in South America right now due to exploitable political and economic instabilities, which for Venturelli means that presenting his counterargument is more important than ever. "If we don't take up some spaces, and we let these kinds of people take these spaces, suddenly they're dictating what's the future, suddenly they're taking the investments so that they are building our next big projects," he said. "That's when it starts to get really dangerous, because it can jeopardize our future as an industry, in my opinion. Because I don't feel like these things have long legs. I feel like they might be successful in the short term, but they are going to fall on the long term for sure." [He went on to say:] "Right now we are living in a crisis of trust in Western society -- trust in each other, in institutions, and even in our future together is in decline," Venturelli says. "We should be building systems that help connect people and build trust, build sustainable solutions, and build infinitely scalable human solutions. We should not be shifting away from culture, entertainment, and storytelling towards economic activity. We should not just be eliminating the final hiding places that we have to run away from the oppression of capitalist society." You can watch Venturelli's The Future of Game Design talk on YouTube. An English version of the slides accompanying it is available here.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) said on Monday it would propose "robust" global rules for cryptocurrencies in October, following recent turmoil in markets that has highlighted the need to regulate the "speculative" sector. From a report: The FSB, a body of regulators, treasury officials and central bankers from the Group of 20 economies (G20), has so far limited itself to monitoring the crypto sector, saying it did not pose a systemic risk. But recent turmoil in crypto markets has highlighted their volatility, structural vulnerabilities and increasing links to the wider financial system, the FSB said.

Nearly all industrial scale Bitcoin miners in Texas have shut off their machines as the companies brace for a heat wave that is expected to push the state's power grid near its breaking point. From a report: Miners such as Riot Blockchain, Argo Blockchain and Core Scientific, who operate millions of energy-intensive computers to secure the Bitcoin blockchain network and earn rewards in the token, flocked to the Lone Star State thanks to its low energy costs and liberal regulations on crypto mining. The state has become one of the largest crypto-mining hubs by computing power in the world.

"There are over 1,000 megawatts worth of Bitcoin mining load that responded to ERCOTs conservation request by turning off their machines to conserve energy for the grid." Lee Bratcher, president of Texas Blockchain Association told Bloomberg in an email response. "This represents nearly all industrial scale Bitcoin mining load in Texas and allows for over 1% of total grid capacity to be pushed back onto the grid for retail and commercial use." Miners may see a drop in profitability as the heat wave keeps their machines off by sending energy prices soaring and further stressing the state's power grid. The miners are already struggling to repay debt and raise additional capital with Bitcoin prices in sharp decline.

In a twist, a massive trove of stolen bitcoins will repay the dark web market creator's $183 million restitution. Wired: Ross Ulbricht, the convicted creator of the legendary Silk Road dark web market for drugs, has never gotten much mercy from the US legal system. In 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. His appeal was denied, as was the pardon he sought from President Trump. But a little over a year ago, it appears Ulbricht finally got a break of a different kind: The nine-figure debt he owed to the US government as part of his sentence will be erased -- all thanks to the fortuitous hoarding of a hacker who'd stolen a massive trove of bitcoins from his market.

Last year, prosecutors quietly signed an agreement with Ulbricht stipulating that a portion of a newfound trove of Silk Road bitcoins, seized from an unnamed hacker, will be used to cancel out the more than $183 million in restitution Ulbricht was ordered to pay as part of his 2015 sentence, a number calculated from the total illegal sales of the Silk Road based on exchange rates at the time of each transaction. Despite the fact that the more recently unearthed stash of bitcoins -- now worth billions of dollars -- was itself criminal proceeds, the Justice Department appears to have made a deal with Ulbricht to avoid any claim he might have made to the money: In exchange for Ulbricht's agreement to waive any ownership he might have of the bitcoins, a portion of them will be used to pay off his restitution in its entirety.

"The parties agree that the net proceeds realized from the sale of the [bitcoins] forfeited pursuant to this agreement shall be credited toward any unpaid balance of the Money Judgment," reads a court filing from last year, using the phrase "money judgment" to refer to Ulbricht's 2015 restitution order. The document, filed in February of 2021, is signed by both Ulbricht and David Countryman, a prosecutor in the asset forfeiture unit of the US Attorney's office for the Northern District of California. The Department of Justice didn't respond to WIRED's request for comment.

Ulbricht, of course, still faces life in prison. He has already served eight years of that sentence at jails in New York and penitentiaries in Colorado and Arizona. But the repayment of his restitution could mean that he's able to earn money in prison to share with family or friends without it being seized or garnished to pay his debts -- or even keep any previously unknown caches of bitcoins that he may possess, so long as they aren't tied to the Silk Road or other criminal sources. And if his sentence is eventually commuted, as his supporters and a years-long Free Ross campaign have petitioned for since even before his sentencing, he would reenter the world as a free man without hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

15-year-old Ellis Pinsky stole $23.8 million worth of cryptocurrency — and his life was never the same. For example, Rolling Stone reports, in his last year of high school, "Four men wearing ski masks and gloves, armed with knives, rope, brass knuckles, and a fake 9 mm," crept around the back of his home in the suburbs: Two weeks before the break-in, a lawsuit had been filed against him, and news stories had circulated connecting him to the hack. He knew that the thieves wanted this money, the millions and millions of dollars he had stolen. He also knew that he couldn't give it to them. He didn't have it. Not anymore.
The magazine paints the portrait of "an anxious young man in Invisalign braces" who describes the revelation he'd had at the age of 13. "The internet held such secrets. All he had to do was uncover them." As he soon found, there were plenty of people working to uncover them all the time, and willing to share their methods — for a price.... Realizing that a lot of the information social engineers used came from hacked databases, he began teaching himself to program, particularly to do the Structured Query Language injections and cross-site scripting that allowed him to attack companies' database architecture. The terabyte upon terabyte of databases he extracted, traded, and hoarded made him valuable to OGUsers as well as to others, like the Russian hackers he was able to converse with thanks to his fluency with his mother's native language... By the time he was 14, he tells me, "I think it's fair to say I had the capabilities to hack anyone."
The article describes him as "attending high school by day and extracting the source code of major corporations by night.... He was 14 years old and taken with the thrill of possessing a hidden superpower, of spending his nights secretly tapping into an underground world where he was esteemed and even feared. And then, in the morning, being called downstairs to breakfast." He wrote a Python script to comb through social media networks and seek out any mentions of working for a [cellphone] carrier. Then he'd reach out with an offer of compensation for helping him with a task. Every fifth or sixth person — underpaid and often working a short-term contract — would say they were game, as Pinsky tells it. For a couple hundred dollars' worth of bitcoin, they'd be willing to do a SIM swap, no questions asked. Eventually, Pinsky says, he had employees at every major carrier also working for him. Then the stakes got even higher. It was only a matter of time before OG hackers, known to each other as "the Community," realized that if they could use the SIM-swapping method to steal usernames, they could just as easily use it to steal cryptocurrency...
In one massive heist Pinksky stole 10% of all the Trigger altcoins on the market from crypto impresario Michael Terpin. ("As Pinsky's money launderers were converting it, the market was crashing in real time.") Pinsky recruited a crew to launder the money — at least one of which simply kept it — but even with all the conversion fees, he still made off with millions. And then... For a while, he half-expected the FBI to knock on his door at any moment, just like in the movies; but as time passed, he grew less anxious.... He says he moved on to learning different types of programming. He ran a sneaker business that used bots and scripts to snap up limited pairs then flip them... He went to soccer practice. He and his friends had started hanging out with girls on the weekend, driving down to the docks where you could see the glowing lights from the Tappan Zee Bridge.
Until Terpin figured out it was Pinsky who'd robbed him: Pinsky and his legal team preempted his arrest by contacting the U.S. attorney directly and offering his cooperation. In February 2020, he voluntarily returned every last thing he says he got from the Terpin heist: 562 bitcoins, the Patek watch, and the cash he'd stored in the safe under his bed.... When I ask if he has also worked with the FBI to help bring down other hackers, he blinks quickly and then changes the subject.
Pinsky has not been criminally charged — partly because he was a minor, but also because of his cooperation with law enforcement. But filing a civil suit, Terpin wants to be compensated with triple the amount stolen, arguing that the teenager who robbed him was running an organized crime racket and that he should be heavily punished to set an example.

Rolling Stone's article raisees the question: what should happen next?