News
North Korean Has Stolen an Estimated US$1.2 Billion in Cryptocurrency

North Korean hackers have stolen an estimated 1.5 trillion won ($1.2 billion) in cryptocurrency and other virtual assets in the last five years, with more than half of it stolen this year alone, according to South Korea’s spy agency.
Following harsh UN sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic, experts and officials say North Korea has turned to cryptocurrency hacking and other illicit cyber activities for desperately needed foreign currency to support its fragile economy and fund its nuclear program.
The National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s main spy agency, said North Korea’s ability to steal digital assets is considered among the best in the world due to the country’s focus on cybercrime since U.N. economic sanctions were tightened in 2017 in response to its nuclear and missile tests.
Sanctions imposed by the United Nations in 2016-17 prohibited key North Korean exports such as coal, textiles, and seafood, and compelled member countries to repatriate North Korean overseas workers. Its economy suffered further setbacks after it imposed some of the world’s most draconian anti-pandemic measures.
According to the NIS, state-sponsored North Korean hackers have stolen 1.5 trillion won ($1.2 billion) in virtual assets around the world since 2017, including approximately 800 billion won ($626 million) this year alone. It stated that South Korea contributed more than 100 billion won ($78 million) to the total.
It is expected that North Korean hackers will conduct more cyberattacks next year in order to steal advanced South Korean technologies as well as confidential information on South Korean foreign policy and national security.
Senior diplomats from the United States, South Korea, and Japan agreed earlier this month to step up efforts to curtail illegal North Korean cyber activities. In February, a panel of United Nations experts stated that North Korea was still stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions, cryptocurrency firms, and exchanges.
Despite its economic difficulties, North Korea has conducted a record number of missile tests this year, which some experts believe is an attempt to modernize its arsenal and increase its leverage in future negotiations with its adversaries for sanctions relief and other concessions.
Warren Buffett has always hated cryptocurrency
Bitcoin and its supporters have had a difficult year. Even back in 2018, the Oracle of Omaha predicted that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were doomed.
“They will have a very bad ending,” Warren Buffett predicted at the time to CNBC.
After reaching an all-time high of around $69,000 per unit on November 10, 2021, the world’s leading digital currency has since lost roughly 75% of its value, and is currently trading at $16,600 as of the end of the trading day on December 19.
Holdout investors who thought they’d missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity are now sighing with relief; those who bought in at the peak are trying not to think about their losses.
What would the world’s most famous investor say to those considering firing up their investment apps and purchasing Bitcoin at a discount?
“If you owned all of the bitcoin in the world and offered it to me for $25, I wouldn’t take it,” Buffett said earlier this year to CNBC.
Aside from Bitcoin’s poor track record, here are three more reasons Buffett will not invest in it.
1. Cryptocurrency has “absolutely no unique value.”
The billionaire investor dislikes Bitcoin because he sees it as a waste of money.
Buffett is well-known for favoring stocks of corporations whose value — and cash flow — is derived from the production of goods. However, cryptocurrencies have no real value, according to Buffett in a CNBC interview in 2020.
“They can’t reproduce, they can’t mail you a check, they can’t do anything, and all you can hope for is that someone else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that person has the problem.”
Though Bitcoin is designed to provide real value as a payment system, its application is still quite limited. According to Buffett, Bitcoin’s value stems from the belief that someone else will be willing to pay more for it in the future than you are now.
2. He does not consider cryptocurrency to be money.
Buffett has made a number of scathing remarks about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency over the years, including: “I don’t have any Bitcoin. “I don’t own any cryptocurrency and will never own any,” he told CNBC in 2020.
Bitcoin has grown in popularity as a tradable asset. But does it meet the three monetary criteria? Money, according to the most common definition, is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account.
Buffett, on the other hand, calls it a “mirage.”
“It does not pass the currency test,” the billionaire said on CNBC in 2014. “It is not a long-term medium of exchange, nor is it a store of value.”
He adds that it’s a very effective way of sending money anonymously. “A check is a way of transmitting money as well,” he added. “Do checks have a lot of value just because they can transfer money?”
3. He does not comprehend it.
By sticking with stocks he understands, Buffett became one of the most successful investors in history.
“I get in enough trouble with things about which I believe I know something. “Why should I take a long or short position in something about which I know nothing?”
But, as he told CNBC after a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in 2018, people like to gamble, which is another issue with nonproductive assets.
“You get much more excited if you don’t understand it than if you do. If you look at something and say, ‘that’s magic,’ you can have anything you want.”
How does Warren Buffet choose winning stocks?
The billionaire investor employs the value investing strategy, which entails purchasing undervalued stocks of strong companies and holding them for an extended period of time.
Isn’t it simple?
Berkshire Hathaway seeks companies with a high profit margin and unique products that cannot be easily substituted. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price,” Warren Buffett once said in a letter to his shareholders.
However, Buffett’s dislike for crypto stocks does not preclude you from purchasing Bitcoin. Even the billionaire has changed his mind about sectors he previously opposed.
He was notorious for avoiding tech stocks, even at the height of the dot-com bubble, and now Apple is his company’s largest holding.

News
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

Pixa Bay
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.
Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
News
2024 | Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case

Washington — Trump Media, The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will not hear an appeal from social media platform X about a search warrant acquired by prosecutors in the election meddling case against former President Donald Trump.
The justices did not explain their rationale, and there were no recorded dissents.
The firm, which was known as Twitter before being purchased by billionaire Elon Musk, claims a nondisclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump about the warrant obtained by special counsel Jack Smith’s team violated its First Amendment rights.
The business also claims Trump should have had an opportunity to exercise executive privilege. If not reined in, the government may employ similar tactics to intercept additional privileged communications, their lawyers contended.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
Two neutral electronic privacy groups also joined in, urging the high court to hear the case on First Amendment grounds.
Prosecutors, however, claim that the corporation never shown that Trump utilized the account for official purposes, therefore executive privilege is not a problem. A lower court also determined that informing Trump could have compromised the current probe.
Trump utilized his Twitter account in the weeks preceding up to his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to spread false assertions about the election, which prosecutors claim were intended to create doubt in the democratic process.
The indictment describes how Trump used his Twitter account to encourage his followers to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification, and falsely claiming that the Capitol crowd, which battered police officers and destroyed glass, was peaceful.
Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal From Elon Musk’s X Platform Over Warrant In Trump Case
That case is now moving forward following the Supreme Court’s verdict in July, which granted Trump full immunity from criminal prosecution as a former president.
The warrant arrived at Twitter amid quick changes implemented by Musk, who bought the company in 2022 and has since cut off most of its workforce, including those dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech.
SOURCE | AP
News
The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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