A big blow for online drug dealers

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that they had seized and shut down AlphaBay, the biggest illegal drug marketplace in internet history.

Operating in the shadows of the “dark web,” AlphaBay hosted $1B in criminal transactions from 200k users and 40k vendors across the world-with a specialty in drugs and fake IDs.

A Canuck gone rogue

AlphaBay was founded in 2014 by Alexandre Cazes, a then-23-year-old Canadian living in Thailand, listed as a “software designer” on LinkedIn  -quiet, shy, and high-achieving, giving off no pretension of shadiness.

Over 2 years, Cazes covertly built AB into a one-stop shop for black market goods, where users used Bitcoin and an untraceable browser to purchase $800k worth of heroin, firearms, and illicit chemicals every day.

But he got cocky€¦ 

U.S. authorities had been tracking AB for months, and they got lucky when Cazes left his email address-  [email protected]  -in the header of a welcome email he sent to new users.

On July 5, he was taken into custody in Thailand on counts including racketeering, narcotics, and money laundering. But before he could be extradited, he hung himself in his prison cell.

Since then, the DOJ has seized his $23m in assets, including $8.8m in cryptocurrency, half a dozen properties, and a $900k Lamborghini.

This. Is. Huge?

When the Silk Road marketplace was seized back in 2013, it had 14k illegal listings-the largest dark web operation of its kind at the time. AlphaBay had 225k listings  -16x that size.

Though law enforcement is boasting about its “record-setting” takedown, what this story really shows is that the dark web has gotten way more robust in recent years. 

Maybe because it’s one of the few online markets Amazon can’t disrupt€¦ 

This article originally appeared at: https://thehustle.co/alphabay-online-drug-market-shut-down?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7%2F21-Alphabay&utm_content=alphabay-online-drug-market-shut-down.

Russia Gets First Sanctioned Cryptocurrency – And It’s Tracking Beef

This story has everything. Cryptocurrency, microchips in cattle, Russian Burger King and a Blockchain startup

The Russian republic of Tatarstan has launched a cryptocurrency dedicated to tracking and verifying beef.

ITcoin, which is Russia’s first sanctioned purpose-built cryptocurrency, launches today and will bring the benefits of Blockchain to the local meat processing industry.

“Low volatility allows ITcoin to be used for settlements – basically a form of commodity barter relationship in which all participants are fully protected,” the currency’s creator Denis Ryndin told local news resource Biznes Online.

Parent company Infinans, which developed ITcoin’s business model, is also set to become a resident project of a business incubator scheme offered by Tatarstan’s second-largest city, Naberezhnye Chelny.

Beyond the exchange process, Ryndin intends to use Blockchain technology to microchip cattle to track their health and condition online.

“With the help of a QR code it will be possible to discover the history of [a piece of] meat,” Biznes Online adds paraphrasing Ryndin.

“The transparency of the process, in turn, increases investment confidence in agriculture.”

Russia’s central bank intends to launch its own analogue of Bitcoin in future, while also regulating cryptocurrency next year.

Consumer habits are also changing, with the country’s Burger King outlets in Moscow launching Bitcoin payments with plans for expansion.

Thanks to Coin Telegram

3 Secrets to Driving Leads to Your Online Sales Funnel

by Craig Simpson

Over the years, I’ve worked with a large number of online marketers who were very successful at finding prospects through direct mail. My experience with them has taught me a lot, and now you will benefit from it. I’m going to share with you three of my best secrets for driving prospects to an online sales funnel.

Secret #1: Use the Right Length of Copy

I send out at least 100 mailings a year that have the purpose of driving prospects online. One lesson that has come home to me again and again is that you have to get the length of the copy right. When it comes to getting people to visit a website, I’ve had the most success mailing postcards, tear-sheets, small self-mailers, check letters, and PURL letters. Each of these pieces is limited in size and looks like it would be quick and easy to read, but it can still be filled with plenty of copy. The idea here is that you whet the appetite of your readers who will then rush to see what else is waiting for them online. 

Remember that too much can be overkill. You don’t need a 12-page sales letter to drive prospects online for a free report, and you do not want to use a magalog, long-form envelope package, or digest piece to try to drive prospects online. The cost to mail out a long-form sales piece usually outweighs the return when the goal is to drive prospects online. By the same token, you can’t sell a $1,200 medical procedure with a simple postcard. In that case, a lot of information is needed, and longer copy works MUCH better.

The bottom line is, you have to make sure the length of your copy matches your call to action. If the call to action requires spending a lot of money from the sales piece itself, you’d better make sure the piece gives plenty of justification and incentive. But, if your goal is to drive prospects online where you will do the majority of the selling, a long sales letter is not only unnecessary, but it may actually be counterproductive.

Secret #2: Provide Multiple Calls to Action

People don’t always read your sales pieces with the care you would like them to. In many cases, they scan it and go back and forth looking at the copy -and they may miss the critical detail of the URL that you want them to go to. So, if you are mailing a small postcard in order to drive prospects online, don’t just give one mention of the URL. Make sure you mention it a number of times. If you are sending prospects a postcard, you should put the call to action and URL at least once on each side.

For example, a few months ago, I sent a postcard promoting one of my teleseminars. The postcard was only 4 x 6, and it was full of copy. But I still managed to put the URL on that little card three times. If you are mailing a larger card, maybe 8.5 x 5.5 or 11 x 6, you should have the call to action on it at least two times on each side.

You might be thinking €¦ this is something easy to do €¦ and it is, BUT I can’t count the number of postcards that I receive that only have the call to action printed on them one time. Don’t assume that the prospect will look for and find the call to action. Your job is to make it easy on prospects to find the information you want them to see. So, make it very clear by putting it in the piece a number of times. Believe me, I’ve tested this over and over, and I know what works. You MUST put the URL on your sales piece multiple times when your goal is to drive prospects online. 

Secret #3: Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak

As I mentioned earlier, if you want to get prospects to a website, all your direct mail piece has to do is whet their appetite. I often see marketers trying to give too many details about the product or service in the postcard or self-mailer that is used to drive prospects online. This is a mistake.

Don’t attempt to do a full selling job on the product or service IN the postcard, self mailer, check letter, etc. Instead, sell the prospect on the idea of your product or service. Intrigue them; make them wonder if this is something that could really enhance their life or solve a problem. If you get them excited about the possibilities, they will eagerly go to the website for the full story.

Keep in mind that your main goal is to get prospects to your online sales funnel so that it can take them to the next step in the process. If you reveal too much too early, you may over qualify prospects; they will make a decision whether or not this is for them too early in the game and may decide it’s not worth it to them to follow up. Remember the power of inertia. It tends to keep us from taking action. If you tell prospects too much about the product or service too soon you may give them ammunition to follow inertia. 

To summarize, make the point of the postcard to get the prospects to go online. Don’t try to sell your product or service. Let that be the next step of your sales funnel.

Craig Simpson has managed thousands of direct mail campaigns and grossed hundreds of millions in revenue for his clients over the past 15 years. Simpson is the owner of Simpson Direct Inc., a Grants Pass, Oregon-based direct marketing firm,…

This article originally appeared at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/293193.

AI Researchers Disagree With Elon Musk’s Warnings About Artificial Intelligence

I don’t think there is any question on whether AI will be smarter than us very soon but I’ll debate how self-aware a machine will become. 

Intelligent machine will be able to mimic the emotions of humans and read us better than we can read ourselves. We’ll get attached, feeling like there’s an emotional attachment from them and all my study leads me to believe we’ll like it and say it makes our lives better.

But even allowing for a self aware machine, the motivation to control or eliminate us will be rationalized out of AI. Just because they are able to eliminate us all doesn’t mean they will come to that conclusion, regardless of out programming. 

A semi-intelligent machine does scare me. Set a machine to optimize production without regard for demand and we could end up drowning in whatever it creates. Fortunatly, we’ll have multiple AI’s helping us control the wayward AIs. 

Researchers are coming to similar conclusions:

 

AI Researchers Disagree With Elon Musk’s Warnings About Artificial Intelligence

When Elon Musk told U.S. governors on Saturday that artificial intelligence (AI) is mankind’s biggest threat, the warning didn’t fall on deaf ears. At least AI researchers caught it. Now they’re saying Musk is being overly cautious about AI. But is he?
Distorting the Debate?

The fear of super-intelligent machines is as real as it gets for Tesla and SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk. He’s spoken about it so many times, but perhaps not in the strongest terms as when he told U.S. governors that artificial intelligence (AI) poses “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” The comment caught the attention of not just the governors present, but also AI researchers-and they’re not very happy about it.

“While there needs to be an open discussion about the societal impacts of AI technology, much of Mr. Musk’s oft-repeated concerns seem to focus on the rather far-fetched super-intelligence take-over scenarios,” Arizona State University computer scientistSubbarao Kambhampati toldInverse. “Mr. Musk’s megaphone seems to be rather unnecessarily distorting the public debate, and that is quite unfortunate.”

Kambhampati, who also heads the Association for the Advancement of AI and is a trustee for the Partnership for AI, wasn’t the only one who reacted to Musk’s most recent AI warning. Francois Chollet and David Ha, deep learning researchers at Google, also took to Twitter to defend AI and machine learning (ML).

AI/ML makes a few existing threats worse. Unclear that it creates any new ones.

-François Chollet (@fchollet) July 16, 2017

University of Washington in Seattle researcher Pedro Domingo simply tweeted a “sigh” of disbelief.

Is There Really an AI Threat?

Both Kambhampati and Ha commented on the premise that Musk-because of his work in OpenAI, in developing self-driving technologies in Tesla, and his recent Neuralink project-has access to cutting edge AI technologies so knows what he’s talking about. “I also have access to the very most cutting-edge AI and frankly I’m not impressed at all by it,” Ha said in another tweet.

Kambhampati, meanwhile, pointed out to the 2016 AI report by the Obama administration that made some very timely but positive recommendations about AI regulations and policies. The White House report didn’t have “the super-intelligence worries that seem to animate Mr. Musk,” Kambhampati said to Inverse, which is a strong indicator that these concerns are not well-founded.

Why do dogs love us? Geneticists hunt for DNA clues

I wonder often IF dogs love us. 

Most people assume so. And here’s research on why. 

I’ll have to assume it’s true until my dog says otherwise

Somehow, dogs have evolved to like being around humans

Somehow, dogs have evolved to like being around humans. In return for their exuberant, slobbery affection, dogs have convinced us to take care of them-driving otherwise sane adults to carry around plastic baggies filled with warm poop. The rough idea is that tens of thousands of years ago, wolves probably began trailing human hunter-gatherers to scavenge their kills. Friendlier wolves may have been fed extra scraps, or more frightening wolves might have been killed-and over time, this group of wolves eventually evolved into dogs.

The genetic blueprint underlying this personality shift is still a mystery, however. So Bridgett vonHoldt, an evolutionary geneticist at Princeton University, and Monique Udell, at Oregon State University, led a team of scientists to find out what sets dogs apart from wolves. Using a combination of genetic sequencing and behavioral tests, they pinpointed a couple genetic differences that seem to track with friendliness, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances.

“This may be one of the first studies to ever identify the specific genetic variants that were important for turning wolves into dogs,” Adam Boyko, a dog geneticist at Cornell University, who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Verge in an email. “Really exciting stuff.” Still, he adds, to be certain the genetic variations vonHoldt’s team identified really are linked to dogs’ friendliness, he’d want to see the results validated in a bigger, and more diverse set of dogs.

The dogs spent more time gazing adoringly at the person than at the puzzle box

The scientists started out by testing how 18 dogs and 10 wolves behave around people. For one test, the dogs and the wolves were tasked with extracting a nice, thick piece of summer sausage from a puzzle box either in front of a person, or alone. The wolves clobbered the dogs in both trials, and could stay focused even when a human was nearby. But the dogs couldn’t; they spent more time gazing adoringly at the person than at the puzzle box.

“What they’re really doing is just obsessively staring at this human,” vonHoldt says. “They don’t really care about the task, they’re just interested in the person.” Another test measured how many times a dog or a wolf sidled up next to a human sitting nearby. Overall, the dogs spent much more time close to the person than the wolves did.

In an earlier study, vonHoldt identified a gene that’s mutated more often in dogs than wolves-possibly because of domestication. This gene also corresponds to one in humans that’s among several deleted in people born with a condition called Williams-Beuren syndrome, or WBS. People with WBS tend to be especially social and friendly, which made the researchers suspect that these genes might be important for friendliness both in people and in dogs.

They’re tantalizing clues in the mystery of dog domestication

So vonHoldt and her team decided to start with that stretch of genes, plotting the behavioral test results against the genetic sequences. They uncovered a few mutations that appear to be linked to dogs’ sweet dispositions: two of them may interfere with the functions of the genes GTF2I and GTF2IRD1, which make proteins responsible for turning other genes on and off. Animals with these mutations appeared to pay more attention to the humans than those without, vonHoldt says.

That would make sense: earlier work showed that deleting these genes in mice makes the little rodents much friendlier. People with WBS who still have functioning versions of GTF2I and GTF2IRD1 aren’t quite as extroverted as people who don’t. In the complicated case of how genes and a dog’s environment might make it more or less friendly, today’s findings aren’t a smoking gun. But they are tantalizing clues in the mystery of dog domestication.

“The story is far from complete.”

“We’re not saying we have found the mutation that controls sociability,” vonHoldt says. There are a lot of genes in the genome that probably contribute to dogs’ demeanors-and she and her team have only investigated a fraction of them, she says. Plus, genes aren’t deterministic; whether a dog was raised in a loving or abusive home, for example, could shape how friendly it is as an adult. “The story is far from complete,” she says.

But that hasn’t stopped her from genotyping her own friendly pup. “She has a number of these mutations,” she says. “The pieces fit together.”

This article originally appeared at: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/19/16000172/dogs-wolves-canines-genetics-evolution-domestication-love-best-friends.

The Carbon Negative Revolution

There was a lot of talk this week about a study showing how much plastic waste the world producing. 

While researching pyrolysis that turns waste into fuel, I came across this environmentally sound idea. 

Good news amongst much hand wringing today.

Published on Aug 29, 2012

As the world’s population skyrockets, reduction of CO2 emissions becomes vital for human survival. However, inconvenient lifestyle changes (conservation, energy efficiency etc) have proven difficult or impossible to implement. How can we leverage technologies, both ancient and new, to make our lives better and fight climate change? Jason Aramburu is a cleantech entrepreneur and researcher currently working with Biochar as a means of developing innovative and low-cost solutions to these challenges.

This article originally appeared at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C7rn6Amf0k.