Meltdown

There are many ways a festival curated by Grace Jones might have played out. Jones’s musical playground was the club, her crucible the disco era. When she began making waves in the early 80s, her music boasted a stern electronic undercurrent and no little funk. She covered too many artists to count.Her Meltdown festival lineup, on ice for two years, is as eclectic as Jones’s pedigree implies. It is, however, busy with up-and-coming talents rather than marquee acts (Solange had to pull out). Leading voices from the African…

Bitcoin and and other cryptocurrencies are in free fall.Dan Kitwood | Getty ImagesThe sell-off in cryptocurrencies deepened even further on Wednesday, with bitcoin sinking very close to the key level of $20,000.Bitcoin plunged as much as 10% to an intraday low of $20,166, according to Coinbase data. It was last trading at $21,544.37, down about 2.6%, around 4:24 p.m. ET. The world's largest digital currency has plunged nearly 70% since the peak of the crypto craze in November 2021.Charlie Morris, founder of digital asset…

Crypto investors are grappling with aggressive interest rate hikes from the U.S. Federal Reserve and a worsening liquidity crunch.Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesBitcoin dropped below the $20,000 mark on Saturday, extending a brutal slide in cryptocurrencies.The price of bitcoin fell 9% in 24 hours to $19,217.81, according to Coin Metrics data. The last time bitcoin fell below that level was December 2020.Ether, the second-largest token, plunged 10% to $997.75, its lowest level since January 2021.Crypto investors are…

Photo: Joanna Nelius/GizmodoApple’s blisteringly fast and remarkably efficient M1 chips have been the catalysts behinda recent MacBook resurgence, but MIT security researchers have found a chink in their armor.MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) scientists revealed in a recent paper a vulnerability in what they call the “last line of security” for the M1 chip. The flaw could theoretically give bad actors a door to gain full access to the core operating system kernel.Before I go any…

A US judge dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Apple Inc of defrauding customers by selling iPhones and iPads whose processors proved vulnerable to two cybersecurity flaws first disclosed in 2018. US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California said customers failed to prove that they overpaid for their devices because Apple knowingly concealed defects, and provided security patches that made its devices significantly slower. The lawsuit was filed after Apple and other companies including Alphabet…

A US judge on Wednesday dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of defrauding customers by selling iPhone handsets and iPad tablets whose processors proved vulnerable to two cybersecurity flaws first disclosed in 2018.US District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California said customers failed to prove that they overpaid for their devices because Apple knowingly concealed defects, and provided security patches that made its devices significantly slower.The lawsuit was filed after Apple and other…

To its advocates, cryptocurrency is, at its heart, a libertarian project to free mankind from the shackles of government—most of all its power to debase a “fiat” currency by printing more of it. Do Kwon, the South Korean creator of the stablecoin TerraUSD, regularly equated fiat currency to “state violence.”So when inflation took off, crypto’s supporters were triumphant. Bitcoin’s value “is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt, that we are at the end of the fiat money regime,” venture capitalist and bitcoin…

At a Mexican restaurant in North London a few weeks ago, a handful of small-time but remarkably discerning retail cryptocurrency investors predicted that terra and luna would crash. Several of them were scoffing at terra, or UST, a stablecoin whose price equivalence to the dollar is underpinned by algorithms and game theory rather than cash or collateral, and at the notion that it would maintain its peg in the long run.The “Ponzinomics” of the project, they informed me, were just too risky. Only one of the investors…