Square has agreed to buy a majority stake in Tidal, the streaming music service led by rapper Jay-Z, as part of an effort to expand the company’s suite of financial tools to musicians and emerging artists. From a report: Square will pay $297 million in a mix of cash and stock to become Tidal’s “significant majority” owner, though Jay-Z and Tidal’s…
Tag: financial
Hackers Exploit Websites To Give Them Excellent SEO Before Deploying Malware
schwit1 shares a report from ZDNet: Cyberattackers have turned to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to deploy malware payloads to as many victims as possible. According to Sophos, the so-called search engine “deoptimization” method includes both SEO tricks and the abuse of human psychology to push websites that have been compromised up Google’s rankings. SEO optimization is used by webmasters to…
Bitcoin Could Either Become Preferred Currency For International Trade Or Face a ‘Speculative Implosion,’ Citi Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Bitcoin rose nearly 7% on Monday as risk assets rallied after last week’s bond rout cooled, with Citi saying the most popular cryptocurrency was at a “tipping point” and could become the preferred currency for international trade. With the recent embrace of the likes of Tesla and Mastercard, bitcoin could be at the…
China Charges Ahead With a National Digital Currency
The electronic Chinese yuan is now being tested in cities such as Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. No other major power is as far along with a homegrown digital currency. From a report: Annabelle Huang recently won a government lottery to try China’s latest economics experiment: a national digital currency. After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Ms. Huang,…
Reddit CEO Says Platform Doesn’t Plan To Ban Pornography
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview that the company supports pornography on its platform, as long as it’s not exploitative. From a report: “You can look at [porn] as exploitative. And, indeed, much of it is. And that’s not the content that we want on Reddit,” Huffman told Axios. “But there’s another aspect that’s empowering. And these are people…
Astrophysicists design ‘radically different’ world map
You know the old problem of how to portray the round globe of Earth on a flat map? Now a trio of map experts has worked together to solve this problem. Their new map is 2-sided and round. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/astrophysicists-new-design-world-map…
The Fed’s System That Allows Banks To Send Money Back and Forth is Down
The Federal Reserve’s system that allows financial institutions to send money back and forth electronically went down Wednesday morning. From a report: The “operational error,” as the Fed described it, impacted multiple services, including its pivotal automated clearinghouse system, which connects depository and related institutions send electronic credit and debt transfers. There were no initial indications that foul play was suspected….
FCC Proposes Rules for Emergency Broadband Program To Keep Struggling Families Online
The FCC has taken a major step toward offering financial support for people struggling to pay broadband bills during the pandemic. If approved, the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program could provide $50 per month to millions of households, and more in tribal lands. From a report: The EBBP was created in the budget passed by Congress earlier this year, which earmarked $3.2…
How Oracle Sells Repression in China
In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it’s been marketing its own software for their surveillance work. From a report: Police in China’s Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense…
New York Sues To Shut Down ‘Fraudulent’ Coinseed Crypto Platform
New York’s attorney general filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to shut down the cryptocurrency platform Coinseed for allegedly defrauding thousands of investors, including by charging hidden trading fees and selling “worthless” digital tokens. From a report: Attorney General Letitia James said Coinseed traded cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin without registering as a broker-dealer, and sold “CSD” tokens without authorization to raise money…