Issue 130
🔫 MEET CRYPTO'S BONNIE AND CLYDE. PLUS, WHY DRONE DELIVERY IS STILL NOT A THING
Hi,
We do have another round of interesting, and sometimes weird, links for you today, and I'm going to share them in just a sec. But I just wanted to acknowledge the current situation before I do that.
We're forced to live in difficult times. We're all in equal parts shocked and concerned about what's going on in Ukraine, looking through news stories and tracking the latest predictions on what could happen next. We support the proud and brave people of Ukraine and hope that this invasion will end soon. 🇺🇦
If you want to help but feel a bit lost among all the fundraising initiatives online, we'd like to recommend a few:
To support the Ukrainian army, you can donate to a bank account set up by the National Bank of Ukraine.
To donate to humanitarian initiatives, the International Rescue Committee or the Humanitarian Aid Account of the National Bank of Ukraine are great places to begin.
In this edition:
⛓️ Using Google Fonts on your site can get you in prison
🔫 Crypto's Bonnie and Clyde
🦟 Why drone delivery is still not a thing
Enjoy,
-Karol
📰 From the Newsroom
Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts ⛓️
Okay, I might have gone too far with the "land you in prison" thing, but someone still got fined for using Google Fonts in a particular manner. Granted, the fine wasn't that huge - €100 (~$110) - but it did set a precedent.
"I got 10 traffic tickets that were higher! What's the big deal?!" - I hear you alright. But here's why this matters:
There's this thing called the GDPR. It's a ruling in the EU that requires websites to be transparent about how they collect user data and what they do with it.
If your site doesn't comply, you risk some serious fines, even up to €20 million.
The fined website in this story used Google Fonts by hosting them on Google's servers instead of the site's main web server.
By doing so, some visitor data got leaked to Google, mainly IP addresses and advertising IDs / cookies. This behavior was not something that the site's visitors were informed of.
The court ruled this was a violation of the GDPR - hence the fine.
The story is more interesting than super-serious, but still worth reading into.
theregister.com
Crypto’s Bonnie and Clyde 🔫
This story is wild! There's no other way to say this. The main part begins in 2016. One lovely August evening, a Hong Kong based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex announced that they had just suffered a security breach that ended in around $58 million (a then current valuation) worth of Bitcoin being stolen.
Fast-forward to February 2022, and we finally know who did it.
Introducing Razzlekhan and Dutch. A what and a who?! Yeah, that's what I said, too.
Heather Morgan (aka. Razzlekhan) and Ilya Lichtenstein (aka. Dutch) were arrested for conspiring to launder Bitfinex's stolen Bitcoin.
Current estimated worth of the Bitcoin - $4.5 billion - yep, no typo.
What's with the weird nicknames, you ask? So, Razzlekhan is actually an artistic nickname that Heather Morgan used for her "musical career." The quotations are not accidental here. The quality of her work is on par with the quality of her Bitcoin laundering.
thenextweb.com
It’s 2022: Where are the drone deliveries we were promised? 🦟
Drones! They were promised to revolutionize the shipping industry. Imagine the possibilities, you drunk-order some junk late at night and get it delivered early morning the next day. Living the dream, right?
Well, it didn't actually pan out like that.
While the hardware is there - and has been there for a couple of years - drone delivery faces a lot of practical and legal challenges.
No-fly zones, no adequate landing spots, possible liabilities, etc., all still make it cheaper to ship goods the traditional way - by truck.
Amazon - the company that promised us drone delivery originally - is quietly withdrawing from their drone program - at least in the public eye.
There's still light at the end of the tunnel in niche markets. Companies like Zipline have been growing their network in Africa, and they are now making an expansion to cater to the US healthcare market.
Apart from the story linked here, there's also this excellent video by Wendover Productions that tackles the topic from a different angle.
thenextweb.com
⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month
Cryptocurrency is officially mainstream. But that doesn't make it not a scam. So, is crypto a miracle or actually a scam?
Speaking of crypto, there have been reports of $1.7 million in NFTs stolen in an apparent phishing attack on OpenSea users.
Censorship has become an important topic these days, and especially if you live someplace where the government likes to know everything about you. Here's how to use Tor and Snowflake to circumvent censorship.
AirTags are one of the coolest pieces of tech that got released in the last couple of years. Those small things can be invaluable when you want to find your keys, or your dog. But there's also a dark side.
Owning a Swiss bank account feels like the ultimate symbol of status. The king of Jordan thinks that too.
We all love that sweet iCloud / Google Drive storage, don't we? The more, the better! But maybe that's not the healthiest approach. Maybe the end of infinite data storage can set you free.
Artificial intelligence is all around us. But not all of it is that intelligent after all. According to one guy, a robot bought his seven-year-old car for more than he paid brand-new.
Amazon's bizarre bazaar: this is the strange final chapter for the tech giant's first bricks-and-mortar bookstore.
So, apparently, gorillas freak out when Shaquille O'Neal comes near them. The Zoo Miami executive confirms.
Should your next car be an EV? Ford certainly thinks so. The company doubles down on EV production in Europe with a $2 billion push.
🎤 It’s How They Said It
Any bookmark worth more than a dollar is a waste of money because you could just use the dollar.
🧮 The numbers game
3,000 more workers are being fired by Better - the company that infamously fired 900 people over Zoom last year.
$111 million - the amount raised by Serena Williams' new venture.
All the shows (!) by Marvel are moving from Netflix to Disney Plus.
Outro
That's it for the week. If you have links to share, then my emails are always open. Simply reply to this email to land in my inbox.
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Have a great month,
- Karol