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Qntra - Herald Of The Most Serene Republic |
Business at a craft table with other players and NPCs.
On June 1st in the monthly report of the S.MG MPEx asset (also traded as pass-through on Havelock Investments), source code for Eulora client were published. Several days later also Windows binaries for the Eulora client followed. Work on releases for other platforms and on a game manual is ongoing. Continue reading
Erwin Speckert was sentenced to three years of prison after a money laundering conviction derived from his arrest while boarding a Greyhound bus with $1.3 million Canadian Dollars in his backpack. Speckert plead guilty back in October and the sentence was arranged this week through agreement between the prosecution and defense lawyers. Speckert had requested his security screening be done in private due to the sensitivity and value of his backpack's contents and after he was assured by the private security officer who screened him that taking that much cash on him was kosher, the private security officer phoned police who assert Speckert consented to a second search conducted by them. Police further assert that Speckert was determined by their investigation to be working as a courier for "illegal gaming" operators. Speckert throughout his time consenting to security searches at the bus station asserted he intended to purchase real estate and was conveying cash in this manner as he reasonably did not trust banks.
As the days wind down before Benjamin Lawsky leaves the New York Department of Financial Services for private practice, Lawsky unveiled the final version of his New York Bitlicense proposal at an event in Washington DC. The full text of the document is available below: Continue reading
New Zealand court Justice Rebecca Ellis has issued a ruling which strikes a serious blow against the efforts of the United States to seize the assets of entrepreneur Kim Dotcom. After March's United States court ruling which sought to seize Dotcom's assets through a legal construction known as the "fugitive disentitlement doctrine" and efforts by New Zealand's Commissioner of Police to assign Dotcom's property to the Crown, Dotcom and his attorney Bram Van der Kolk sought relief through judicial review of the actions in New Zealand courts. Continue reading
In the free speech case Elonis vs. United State which was featured earlier on Qntra, the justices of the United States Supreme Court decided in favor of Elonis. Elonis challenged his conviction under Federal statutes prohibiting the interstate transmission of threats for his having authored rap lyrics. The justices vacated the conviction and sent the case back to a lower court to be reconsidered under a stricter standard for prosecution which would require demonstrating Elonis had a criminally culpable state of mind, or Mens Rea when disseminating his lyrics. While the decision was not a complete victory for Elonis the idea that offense is something imposed by the recipient of an utterance, and if utterances are to ever be criminal Mens Rea must be established is almost a positive development in the bleak wasteland of the United States legal system.
A few hours ago Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to a life of incarceration for convictions related to operating a website. Let's look at some other sentences handed down by American courts recently:
Terry and Victoria Smith (archived) were sentenced to seven years in prison by a St Charles County, Missouri court for keeping their six year old child with autism in an excrement filled cage. The judge in the case, Ted house also imposed a fine of five hundred dollars on each parent. Back in 2010 police, paramedics, and a case worker visited the Smith's home after receiving a tip through a child abuse hotline and found the Smith's autistic son locked in the cage. The seven year sentence is the maximum that could be imposed in this case. Continue reading
Today on the Sourceforge hosted Bitcoin-development mailing list Gavin Andresen has threatened to leave his present group of Bitcoin software developers over their objections to his demands for a rapid hardfork of the Bitcoin network. In the event his demands are not met Gavin plans to join Mike Hearn's Bitcoin-XT project which is a fork of the Bitcoin client where Hearn implements patches that Gavin's current affiliated developers find too risky to implement in any mainline Bitcoin client. If Gavin defects to Bitcoin-XT he plans to work with Hearn to lobby merchants, miners, and businesses to move to Bitcoin-XT. Previously Mike Hearn was responsible for the March 2013 Bitcoin network crisis. The full text of Gavin's message is mirrored below for posterity. Continue reading
Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1999 through 2007, was indicted today on charges of structuring bank withdrawals to avoid mandatory bank reporting and lying about the purpose of the withdrawals to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hastert is alleged to have made the cash withdrawals to "compensate for and conceal" some past transgression against an unnamed individual which ended with Hastert and the other party reaching a privately negotiated settlement. Prior to his career in politics Hastert was a teacher at Yorkville High School in Illinois where he additionally coached wrestling and football. Continue reading
The United States Internal Revenue Service has now confirmed that a March 30th report by Brian Krebs where he revealed an online portal operated by the IRS for disseminating tax transcripts had been leaking personal information and tax records to parties who ought not to have been authorized to view them. According to the the IRS more than one hundred thousand records were accessed in this manner. This news follows an epic volume of falsified tax returns filed this year sending tax overpayments to fraudsters to the point where major tax preparation companies had to stop handling state tax returns. The gravity of this leak's potential impact on the tenth of a million affected persons can not be underestimated considering the manner in which the fiat state handles identity: Continue reading
The Brantford Expositor reports that Vault of Satoshi still has a number of customers whose funds have not been returned, even though Vault of Satoshi ceased operations back in February. Expositor reported Susan Gamble along with general allegations against Vault of Satoshi's operators present the story of a customer, Scott Campbell: Continue reading