Cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin sued AT&T over a SIM card attack in 2018 that lost him control over $23 million.

Now Bloomberg reports that he's suing the "15-year-old hacker and his crew of 'evil computer geniuses'" behind the attack. (Alternate source) Terpin, the founder and chief executive officer of blockchain advisory firm Transform Group, is suing Ellis Pinsky, now 18, for $71 million under a federal racketeering law that allows for triple damages. "Pinsky and his other cohorts are in fact evil computer geniuses with sociopathic traits who heartlessly ruin their innocent victims' lives and gleefully boast of their multi-million-dollar heists," Terpin said in his complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan.

Pinsky, of Irvington, New York, couldn't be reached for comment....

According to Terpin. Pinsky's ring identifies people with large cryptocurrency holdings and gains control of their phones by bribing or fooling employees of their wireless carriers. The hackers are then able to intercept authentication messages, gain information and drain the victims' cryptocurrency accounts.

Pinsky has boasted to friends that, starting at age 13, he stole more than $100 million worth of cryptocurrency, hundreds of thousands of dollars of which has been converted into cash stored in his bedroom, the lawsuit alleges. Terpin also claims that, after confronting Pinsky about his alleged role in the theft, the teenager sent him cryptocurrency, cash and a watch with a combined value of $2 million. He claims this was an admission by Pinsky that he had stolen from Terpin.

A Forbes contributor notes that Belkin abruptly announced the end-of-life for its Wemo NetCams, which will discontinued on May 29 2020. But that's just the beginning... Unlike many other end-of-life announcements which simply render products ineligible for support or upgrades, Belkin is literally pulling the plug on its Cloud service, rendering its NetCam range of home security cameras as useless beige bricks...

The question of how Belkin are deliberately bricking their products needs to be called out. When the NetCam was released, users had the option to use the Wemo software (which was lousy) or connect to the cameras using ffmpeg with their favourite NVS platform or even with VLC or equivalent. However, in a firmware update a few years back — Belkin disabled this capability. While workarounds do exist, such as the one published by Vladimir Sobolev in 2018, the whole premise of buying a Belkin product is for ease of use and simplicity. Belkin claim to design 'people inspired products'. All customers of Belkin need to look carefully at these words and see how they match up with their deeds?

How many other Belkin products might be switched off on a whim?

The criticism can be applied to cloud-enabled products as a whole, but in the main — vendors understand that to alienate customers by bricking their possessions is not a viable long term strategy to maintain trust...

Forthcoming European legislation forcing technology companies to make their products easier to repair should go some way to address these concerns.
The article points out that even Microsoft gave Windows 7 users five years of warnings about its 2020 end-of-life.

And it also complains property owners now face two difficult choices: "Either leaving their property with no security system and zero surveillance capability, or breaking the quarantine orders in order to install new equipment."

"Software developers, like everyone else, have had to transition to a work-from-home world," writes InfoWorld. For the users of GitHub, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant changes in work cadence and collaboration, along with an increased risk of burnout, a GitHub study of usage patterns on the Microsoft-owned code sharing site has found." In an "Octoverse spotlight" analysis published May 6, 2020, GitHub compared the first three months of 2020 with the first three months of 2019... GitHub said its analysis shows that developers have been resilient to the change wrought by COVID-19, with activity holding consistent or increasing through the crisis.
But their analysis also found:

• Developers are working longer, by "up to an hour per day," seven days a week.

• Slightly more pushes, pull requests, reviewed pull requests, and commented issues.

• More collaboration on open source projects, and less time to merge pull requests into open source projects.

Annual Las Vegas hacker gathering DEF CON has officially called off its physical conference for this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Register reports: In what was pretty much a foregone conclusion, the organizing team today said the in-person event would not be held in 2020. It had been slated to take place in August. This comes after the more formal Black Hat USA event, usually scheduled to run the same week as DEF CON in Sin City, was shelved as an in-person shindig, due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic forcing everyone to stay home where possible. Both shows will tentatively take place as web streaming affairs this summer. For DEF CON 28, this means a 'Safe Mode' online gathering, with video streams and a Discord server, between August 6 and 9. "Even if a vaccine were to be discovered tomorrow it would not be soon enough to test, manufacture, distribute and administer in time for people to safely to travel by August," explained Jeff "The Dark Tangent" Moss.

"Too many states have stayed open or are reopening, people partied for far too long, and the lack of federal coordination gives me no hope that things will get back to normal this year. I also worry that the conferences that postponed to later this year will be caught up in the 'second wave' after restrictions start to ease and they will end up having to cancel. Because of this, postponing for DEF CON was not an option."