Top Tech Week in Review, March 26-30, 2023
As heard on America in the Morning
This is the top tech minute we can review for March 27th through March 30th. Terra Luna CEO Doug Quan was arrested Thursday in Montenegro. Tara Luna was at the beginning of the crypto collapse of last year and was one of the event's credited with the industry slide. The SEC alleged that Quan was behind the $40 billion evaporation of funds behind the Luna Stablecoin and had stated on Twitter that he is not on the run or anything similar.
One of the first production ready human form robots known as Digit has released the upgraded version that will be handling bulk material in warehouses and distribution centers. Damian Shelton, CEO of Agility Robotics, said digital will be taking on the dull and dirty, dangerous tasks and allowing people to focus on more creative and complex work. And Intel's founder, Gordon Moore, died on Friday at the age of 94.
Intel, the manufacturer for microprocessors in 80% of the world's computers, has worked under the theory dubbed Moore's Law. That is, the amount of microprocessors in every PC will double every two years. The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, is being sued by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC has alleged that it is operating an illegal exchange and a sham compliance program.
They have also accused Binance of failing to implement procedures that would prevent terrorist financing and money laundering. Crypto friendly Silicon National Bank has been partially sold to US banking giant First Citizens. The sale price of $72 billion is a bargain price at a discount of $16.5 billion and Ticketmaster debuts NFT gated ticket sales, starting with the popular band Avenged Sevenfold.
Ticketmaster will be offering a token gated option for an exclusive ticket access. NFT holders will have special access to merchandizing and additional perks that come with being an NFT holder. Band member M Shadows said that about 1000 total tickets were purchased between the two shows, with the NFT gating feature. Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of the FTC's cryptocurrency exchange, is now facing a 13th charge in federal court.
New charges were added on Tuesday related to an alleged bribe made to Chinese officials in the amount of $40 million. These bribes were purported to influence the Chinese officials to unlock investment firm Almeida's trading accounts, holding $1 billion in cryptocurrency. Bankman-Fried Freed was told that these accounts were locked related to an investigation into an Alameda counterparty. It was also alleged that Bankman-Fried authorized the illicit transfer of cryptocurrency to at least one Chinese official around $40 million.
And when the accounts were unfrozen, they authorized an additional transfer of tens of millions of dollars to complete the bribe. Additional allegations from prosecutors unearthed Bankman-Fried attempts to gain political influence through lobbying efforts and political donations. Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts are calling for a six month pause in developing systems on the more powerful open A.I. GPT four platform.
In a letter sent by the Future of Life Institute, Musk and 400 other people said that powerful A.I. systems should be developed only once. We are confident that their efforts will be positive and the risks will be manageable. In Washington, at least 50 government staffers stationed in ten different countries were targeted with commercial hacking tools commonly known as spyware.
A senior administration official has said, highlighting the growing threat by cyber vendors and prompting the White House to introduce rules to hinder the spying. Bitcoin trading up 4.4% to 28,400 and Ethereum up 1.77% to 804. Thanks for listening. For more top tech stories and interviews, visit the top tech talk show Dot. Be sure to subscribe and share with your friends.