Author: Cyrus Farivar

According to a December 2013 affidavit of an ongoing federal criminal case in Rockland, Massachusetts, one alleged drug dealer named Harold Bates was found out simply by the digital trail he left on the USPS’ Track n’ Confirm website. The affidavit was added to the court docket in January 2015, and the case was first reported by Motherboard.

Bates was charged back in March 2014 with conspiracy to import methylone (also known as “molly”), importation of methylone, and possession with intent to distribute methylone, among other crimes. Last month, the judge in the case ruled against Bates in his attempt to supress evidence seized in those packages.

Twitter’s stock price has tumbled over 18 percent after Selerity, a little-known financial tech startup—using a bot that scans financial results-related URLs—published the company’s quarterly results before Twitter announced them officially on Tuesday. The company’s stock price ended the day at $42.27 per share.

Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.

— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

Selerity did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

The San Francisco social network giant lost over $162 million in the first quarter of 2015, about $30 million more than it lost during the same period in 2014.

A Chicago man has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social networking giant is in violation of an Illinois state law that requires users to expressly consent to instances where their biometric information being used.

Plaintiff Carlo Licata argues that he and countless other Illinois residents have had their rights violated under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” feature. That feature is powered by facial recognition technology, and operates without the consent of those being tagged.

Licata wants the Cook County court to declare that Facebook is in violation of BIPA, ordering it to halt its practice, and to award statutory damages to the class, which has yet to be certified.

A small town police department just outside of Boston finally agreed to pay a $500 ransom to regain access to a police server that it had been locked out of after being infected with CryptoLocker ransomware. As the name suggests, once the malware infects a computer, it encrypts the drive and can only be unlocked once the private key is entered—for which the criminals demand a ransom payment.

The Tewksbury Police Department chief told its local newspaper, the Tewksbury Town Crier that those who infected the computers in early December 2014 were “terrorists.”

“Nobody wants to negotiate with terrorists. Nobody wants to pay terrorists,” said Chief Timothy Sheehan. “We did everything we possibly could.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), under approval from the top echelons of the Department of Justice, ran a secret, extensive phone metadata bulk collection program for over two decades, amassing billions of records, according to a new report published Tuesday in USA Today.

This database had previously been revealed to a lesser extent earlier this year, but neither its operational details nor its scope had been revealed until now.

The newspaper wrote:

One of the newly elected board members of the Bitcoin Foundation—the 2.5-year-old organization that was meant to bring order to the famously open source and freewheeling cryptocurrency—has declared the group “effectively bankrupt.”

While the Bitcoin Foundation obviously does not have control over Bitcoin itself, it’s the closest thing to a public face that the community has. Individual memberships start at $25, while corporate memberships start at $1,000 annually. The non-profit’s own tax filings from 2013 show that it ended that year with over $4.7 million in total assets—nearly five times as much as it had at the same time the previous year. It has yet to release financial details for 2014.

The organization was founded in 2012 by a number of Bitcoin luminaries who have since fallen, and the group itself has been marred by controversy in recent months. Of its original five founders, one is now in prison (Charlie Shrem), another oversaw the collapse of the largest Bitcoin exchange (Mark Karpeles), and yet another has since left the United States for a Caribbean nation known for offshore banking (Roger Ver). Of the original board members, only Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen has remained.

OAKLAND, Calif.—If you have driven in Oakland any time in the last few years, chances are good that the cops know where you’ve been, thanks to their 33 automated license plate readers (LPRs).

Now Ars knows too.

In response to a public records request, we obtained the entire LPR dataset of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), including more than 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014. The dataset is likely the largest ever publicly released in the United States—perhaps in the world.

In response to a recent lawsuit, the Anaheim Police Department (APD) in Southern California has released a short one-page letter attempting to explain how it seeks permission for and uses stingrays, the surveillance devices often used to track criminal suspects by locating their mobile phones. The letter was distributed to media and posted (PDF) on the APD’s site last Friday.

But after some online searching, Ars located a similarly publicly available document posted on the website of the city attorney of San Diego (PDF) that has near-identical language to the Anaheim letter. That document’s format indicates that it was authored by a federal agency. Another version of this stingray letter was released in February 2015 by the Gwinnett County Police Department in Northern Georgia.

When asked about the template, Lt. Eric Trapp, an APD spokesman, confirmed late Monday: “FBI material was consulted and considered. Some of that material was included in the content of the letter.”

Evolution, the Dark Web’s largest underground marketplace, appears to have closed its doors abruptly on Tuesday evening. Ars was unable to access the site as of Wednesday morning.

The site’s creators, who go by the online monikers Kimble and Verto, also have apparently absconded with over $11.7 million in bitcoin. According to Wired, Verto was also the creator and administrator of Tor Carding Forum (TCF), a longstanding “private forum that charges $50 to join, has long maintained a brisk trade in stolen financial details.”

Like the previous incarnations of Silk Road, Evolution (or “Evo” as it’s known to its users) requires Tor for access and offers a slew of questionable goods for sale in bitcoins. Evo itself took in between 2.5 and 4 percent of all transactions.