From the BBC: "Individuals associated with the U.S. military" are linked to an online propaganda campaign, Meta's latest adversarial-threat report says....

On Facebook, 39 accounts, 16 pages, and two groups were removed, as well as 26 accounts on Instagram, for violating the platforms' policy against "coordinated inauthentic behaviour". "This network originated in the United States," Meta wrote. It focused on countries including Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Somalia, Syria, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Yemen — and mirrored tactics commonly used in propaganda campaigns against the West...

Some of those supporting the U.S. had posed as independent media outlets and some had tried to pass off content from legitimate outlets, such as BBC News Russian, as their own. The operation ran across many internet services, including Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, according to Meta. "Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military," its report says.
The article adds that experts believe the campaign "was largely ineffective."

About an hour ago SpaceX began tweeting video highlights of their latest launch — a NASA-commissioned resupply mission for the International Space Station.

- "Liftoff!"

- "Falcon 9's first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship"

- "Dragon separation confirmed; autonomous docking to the Space Station on Sunday, November 27 at ~7:30 a.m. ET"

You can watch the whole launch on SpaceX's web site. But CNN explains that SpaceX "has launched more than two dozen resupply missions to the space station over the past decade as part of a multibillion-dollar deal with NASA. This launch comes amid SpaceX's busiest year to date, with more than 50 operations so far, including two astronaut missions."

And yet this one carries something unique. (And it's not just the Thanksgiving-themed treats and solar arrays to boost the space station's power...) Nutrients are a key component of maintaining good health in space. But fresh produce is in short supply on the space station compared with the prepackaged meals astronauts eat during their six-month stays in low-Earth orbit. "It is fairly important to our exploration goals at NASA to be able to sustain the crew with not only nutrition but also to look at various types of plants as sources for nutrients that we would be hard-pressed to sustain on the long trips between distant destinations like Mars and so forth," said Kirt Costello, chief scientist at NASA's International Space Station Program and a deputy manager of the ISS Research Integration Office.

Astronauts have grown and tasted different types of lettuce, radishes and chiles on the International Space Station. Now, the crew members can add some dwarf tomatoes — specifically, Red Robin tomatoes — to their list of space-grown salad ingredients. The experiment is part of an effort to provide continuous fresh food production in space.... The space tomatoes will be grown inside small bags called plant pillows installed in the Vegetable Production System, known as the Veggie growth chamber, on the space station. The astronauts will frequently water and nurture the plants....

The hardware is still in development for larger crop production on the space station and eventually other planets, but scientists are already planning what plants might grow best on the moon and Mars. Earlier this year, a team successfully grew plants in lunar soil that included samples collected during the Apollo missions. "Tomatoes are going to be a great crop for the moon," Massa said. "They're very nutritious, very delicious, and we think the astronauts will be really excited to grow them there."

"A violent workers' revolt at the world's largest iPhone factory this week in central China is further scrambling Apple's strained supply," reports CNN, adding that the revolt is also "highlighting how the country's stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting global technology firms." The troubles started last month when workers left the factory campus in Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan, due to Covid fears. Short on staff, bonuses were offered to workers to return. But protests broke out this week when the newly hired staff said management had reneged on their promises. The workers, who clashed with security officers wearing hazmat suits, were eventually offered cash to quit and leave.

Analysts said the woes facing Taiwan contract manufacturing firm Foxconn, a top Apple supplier which owns the facility, will also speed up the pace of diversification away from China to countries like India.

Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, told CNN Business that the ongoing production shutdown in Foxconn's sprawling campus in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou was an "albatross" for Apple. "Every week of this shutdown and unrest we estimate is costing Apple roughly $1 billion a week in lost iPhone sales. Now roughly 5% of iPhone 14 sales are likely off the table due to these brutal shutdowns in China," he said.

Demand for iPhone 14 units during the Black Friday holiday weekend was much higher than supply and could cause major shortages leading into Christmas, Ives said, adding that the disruptions at Foxconn, which started in October, have been a major "gut punch" to Apple this quarter. In a note Friday, Ives said Black Friday store checks show major iPhone shortages across the board.
Ives' note says he believes "many Apple Stores now have iPhone 14 Pro shortages ... of up to 25%-30% below normal heading into a typical December."

CNN also cites an analyst at TF International Securities who estimated on Twitter that more than 10% of global iPhone production capacity has been affected by the situation at the Zhengzhou campus.

Are we missing some clarifying details in the saga of Sam Bankman-Fried? The New York Post seems to think so, writing among other things, that inside a glamorous Bahamas penthouse, 10 roommates became "a group of financial renegades that dropped speed, blithely swapped in and out of relationships with one another, and watched their boss play video games while pitching for a billion-dollar investment." And they all lived together at "Albany, Bahamas, home to the swanky $40 million digs" used by cryptocurrency giant FTX & "the $15 billion company that went recently belly up amid allegations of fraud and mismanagement" according to accounts of staffers who lived and worked there. Led by disgraced CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old Californian known as SBF, the group pulled all-nighters while high on amphetamines at their retreat"; which boasted six bedrooms, two elevators, manicured grounds, a golf course and a boat basin packed with super yachts.

"The feeling was that they were treating Albany like a frat house," a well-heeled Bahamian local told The Post.....

"Stimulants when you wake up, sleeping pills if you need them when you sleep" that was the formula for FTX's success, according to a tweet from Bankman-Fried....

"He gave money for this, money for that," a restaurateur in Nassau told The Post. "I don't know if he is a great fellow with bad management." Asked what the Albany locals are saying about the implosion of FTX, the high-society source responded: "Nothing. They're embarrassed."

Google says "60% of the internet is duplicate." Gary Illyes from Google posted this slide at the Google Search Central Live in Singapore the other day.

Proton Next has been announced by Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter, as an easier way to check out and test the upcoming stable releases of new Proton versions for Linux desktop and Steam Deck. GamingOnLinux reports: It is mostly the same as the Release Candidate for Proton 7.0-5 that was put up in October. However, it's now its own entry in Steam as Proton Next. This makes it far easier to test, since you can set it to games individually, instead of opting into a Beta with the current main version of Proton. This new Proton Next will only become available when there is a new version of Proton ready for testing, and once stable it will be retired. So games you've set to it, would likely just get bumped to the main version of Proton since it would replace it. The changelog and patch notes are available here.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was seeking information from collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX earlier this year, the Prospect reported Wednesday, bringing a new perspective to an effort by a bipartisan group of congressmembers to slow down that investigation. From the report: The March letter [PDF] from eight House members -- four Democrats and four Republicans -- questioned the SEC's authority to make informal inquiries to crypto and blockchain companies, and intimated that the requests violated federal law. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), whom the Republican caucus just elected as majority whip, the number three position in the House GOP leadership, led the letter. In a contemporaneous Twitter thread, Emmer wrote: "My office has received numerous tips from crypto and blockchain firms that SEC Chair Gary Gensler's information reporting 'requests' to the crypto community are overburdensome, don't feel particularly ... voluntary ... and are stifling innovation."

We now know that FTX was one of those firms receiving information requests from the SEC, about the very activities that have brought down the firm. This raises the question of whether Emmer and the other congressmembers were acting on behalf of FTX (which has been credibly accused of snatching customer money to make risky bets) to try to chill an ongoing investigation from an independent regulatory and law enforcement agency. Some of the "Blockchain Eight," as the Prospect termed them in March, have benefited from crypto largesse. Five of the eight members received campaign donations from FTX employees, ranging from $2,900 to $11,600. Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC), one of the signatories, received half a million dollars in support from a Super PAC created by FTX co-CEO Ryan Salame.

SonicSpike shares a report from Futurism: It appears that NASA's Artemis 1 rocket launch pad caught way more damage than expected when it finally took off from Kennedy Space Center last week. As Reuters space reporter Joey Roulette tweeted, a source within the agency said that damage to the launchpad "exceeded mission management's expectations," and per his description, it sounds fairly severe.

"Elevator blast doors were blown right off, various pipes were broken, some large sheets of metal left laying around," the Reuters reporter noted in response to SpaceNews' Jeff Foust, who on Friday summarized a NASA statement conceding that the launchpad's elevators weren't working because a "pressure wave" blew off the blast doors. Shortly after the launch, NASA acknowledged that debris was seen falling off the rocket, though officials maintain that it caused "no additional risk" to the mission. In spite of those sanguine claims, however, reporters revealed that NASA seemed very intent on them not photographing the Artemis launch tower -- and now, with these preliminary reports about how messed up it seems to have gotten, we may know why.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that's today powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in a response to a Twitter user's complaint about Mastodon's complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg -- whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 -- suggested the user "come to Tumblr" as the site would soon "add activitypub for interconnect."

"Don't stress," he said, before clarifying that Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter, but that support for "interop and activitypub" were due to come "ASAP." In short, this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to instead become a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts -- and one whose user base has grown in size in recent days as people flee Elon Musk's Twitter in search of new communities.

The ActivityPub protocol, its website explains, provides a client-to-server API for creating, updating, and deleting content as well as a federal server-to-server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content. In practice, this means that Mastodon users can interact and follow users on other instances (independently run nodes), as well as with users on other social apps (like PeerTube), which also support the implementation of ActivityPub. It makes for a web of social networks where users can find and follow each other without having to set up new accounts on each new service. This is the opposite approach to today's "walled garden" social networks, where a post on one platform can't be viewed by those on others, unless you re-upload or repost the content directly or share a link to the other site where the content can be found.

A new analysis has claimed that Apple's device analytics contain information that can directly link information about how a device is used, its performance, features, and more, directly to a specific user, despite Apple's claims otherwise. MacRumors reports: On Twitter, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry have found that Apple's device analytics data includes an ID called "dsId," which stands for Directory Services Identifier. The analysis found that the dsId identifier is unique to every iCloud account and can be linked directly to a specific user, including their name, date of birth, email, and associated information stored on iCloud.

On Apple's device analytics and privacy legal page, the company says no information collected from a device for analytics purposes is traceable back to a specific user. "iPhone Analytics may include details about hardware and operating system specifications, performance statistics, and data about how you use your devices and applications. None of the collected information identifies you personally," the company claims. In one possible differentiator, Apple says that if a user agrees to send analytics information from multiple devices logged onto the same iCloud account, it may "correlate some usage data about Apple apps across those devices by syncing using end-to-end encryption." Even in doing so, however, Apple says the user remains unidentifiable to Apple. We've reached out to Apple for comment.

Slashdot has been covering plans for the UK's largest chip plant to be acquired by Chinese-owned firm Nexperia.

But this week the U.K. government "has blocked the takeover of the country's largest microchip factory by a Chinese-owned firm," CNBC reported this week, "over concerns it may undermine national security." Grant Shapps, minister for business, energy and industrial strategy, on Wednesday ordered Dutch chipmaker Nexperia to sell its majority stake in Newport Wafer Fab, the Welsh semiconductor firm it acquired for £63 million ($75 million).

Nexperia is based in the Netherlands but owned by Wingtech, a partially Chinese state-backed company listed in Shanghai. Nexperia completed its acquisition of Newport Wafer Fab in 2021, and the firm subsequently changed its name to Nexperia Newport Limited, or NN.

"The order has the effect of requiring Nexperia BV to sell at least 86% of NNL within a specified period and by following a specified process," the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement. Nexperia had initially owned 14% of Newport Wafer Fab, but in July 2021 it upped its stake to 100%.

"We welcome foreign trade & investment that supports growth and jobs," Shapps tweeted Wednesday. "But where we identify a risk to national security we will act decisively."
Nexperia plans to appeal the decision.

Ticketmaster provoked ire with a botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift's first concert in five years. NPR reports: On Thursday afternoon, the day before tickets were due to open to the general public, Ticketmaster announced that the sale had been cancelled altogether due to "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Taylor Swift broke her silence on Friday in statement on Instagram in which she said it is "excruciating for me to watch mistakes happen with no recourse." She said there are many reasons people had a hard time getting tickets, and she's trying to figure out how to improve the situation moving forward. "I'm not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," she wrote, without naming Ticketmaster.
America's Justice Department "has opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster," reports the New York Times. But the investigation "predates the botched sale" and "is focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry." The new investigation is the latest scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment, which is the product of a merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster that the Justice Department approved in 2010. That created a giant in the live entertainment business that still has no equals in its reach or power.... The debacle involving Ms. Swift's concert tickets this week has exacerbated complaints in the music business and in Washington that Live Nation's power has constrained competition and harmed consumers.
Or, as NPR puts it, "The frenzy has brought renewed scrutiny to the giant Ticketmaster, which critics have long accused of abusing its market power at the expense of consumers." Would-be concertgoers have complained vocally about recent incidents with near-instant sellouts and skyrocketing prices, and artists like Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have feuded with it over the decades. One common complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a clear alternative or competitor to Ticketmaster, especially after it merged with concert provider Live Nation in 2010 (a controversial move that required conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Justice).

Now Tennessee's attorney general, a Republican, is opening a consumer protection investigation into the incident. North Carolina's attorney general announced on Thursday that his office is investigating Ticketmaster for allegedly violating consumers' rights and antitrust laws. And multiple Democratic lawmakers are asking questions about the company's dominance â" not for the first time.... "Taylor Swift's tour sale is a perfect example of how the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger harms consumers by creating a near-monopoly," tweeted Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), one of several lawmakers who has long called for investigation and accountability into the company, especially after becoming a subsidiary of concert behemoth Live Nation.
The article also cites a Thursday statement from Ticketmaster: The company says that using Verified Fan invite codes has historically helped manage the volume of users visiting the website to buy tickets, though that wasn't the case on Tuesday. "The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn't have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site, resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests â" 4x our previous peak," it said, adding that it slowed down some sales and pushed back others to stabilize its systems, resulting in longer wait times for some users.

It estimates that about 15% of interactions across the website experienced issues, which it said is "15% too many."
The Tuesday sale also broke Ticketmaster's record for most tickets sold for an artist in a single day," reports People, "selling two million tickets."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for submitting the story.

The Browser Company's Chromium-based Arc browser "isn't perfect, and it takes some getting used to," writes the Verge. "But it's full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web — and it's right about most of them." Arc wants to be the web's operating system. So it built a bunch of tools that make it easier to control apps and content, turned tabs and bookmarks into something more like an app launcher, and built a few platform-wide apps of its own. The app is much more opinionated and much more complicated than your average browser with its row of same-y tabs at the top of the screen. Another way to think about it is that Arc treats the web the way TikTok treats video: not as a fixed thing for you to consume but as a set of endlessly remixable components for you to pull apart, play with, and use to create something of your own. Want something to look better or have an idea for what to do with it? Go for it.

This is a fun moment in the web browser industry. After more than a decade of total Chrome dominance, users are looking elsewhere for more features, more privacy, and better UI. Vivaldi has some really clever features; SigmaOS is also betting on browsers as operating systems; Brave has smart ideas about privacy; even Edge and Firefox are getting better fast. But Arc is the biggest swing of them all: an attempt to not just improve the browser but reinvent it entirely....

Right now, Arc is only available for the Mac, but the company has said it's also working on Windows and mobile versions, both due next year. It's still in a waitlisted beta and is still very much a beta app, with some basic features missing, other features still in flux, and a few deeply annoying bugs. But Arc's big ideas are the right ones. I don't know if The Browser Company is poised to take on giants and win the next generation of the browser wars, but I'd bet that the future of browsers looks a lot like Arc....

In a way, Arc is more like ChromeOS than Chrome. It tries to expand the browser to become the only app you need because, in a world where all your apps are web apps and all your files are URLs, who really needs more than a browser?
The article describes Arc as a power user tool with vertical sidebar combining bookmarks, tabs, and apps. (And sets of these can apparently be combined into different "spaces".) These are enhanced with a hefty set of keyboard shortcuts (including tab searching), along with built-in media controls for Twitch/Spotify/Google Meet (as well as a picture-in-picture mode).
BR. Arc even has a shareable, collaborative whiteboard app "Easel". And it also offers powerful features like the ability to rewrite how your browser displays any site's CSS. ("I have one that removes the Trending sidebar from Twitter and another that cleans up my Gmail page.")

According to documents recently declassified by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), former President Donald Trump posted a classified satellite image of a failed rocket launch in Iran on Twitter in 2019. NPR reports: Now, three years after Trump's tweet, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has formally declassified the original image. The declassification, which came as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, followed a grueling Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the briefing slide it came from could be shared with the public. Many details on the original image remain redacted -- a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the U.S. government's most prized intelligence on social media, says Steven Aftergood, specialist in secrecy and classification at the Federation of American Scientists. "He was getting literally a bird's eye view of some of the most sensitive US intelligence on Iran," he says. "And the first thing he seemed to want to do was to blurt it out over Twitter." "[A]erospace experts determined the photo was taken by a classified spacecraft called USA 224, believed to be a multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance aircraft," adds Gizmodo. "The spacecraft is similar to the Hubble Telescope, but instead of getting a closer look at the stars, it views the Earth's surface."

Frederick Brooks, the famed computer architect who discovered the software tar pit and designed OS/360, died Thursday. He also debunked the concept of the Mythical Man-Month in his book, writing: "Adding manpower to software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer."

A true icon, who won the Turing Award in 2000, Brooks was one of the great thinkers in computing. Industry tributes are pouring in the celebration of his contribution and life.

Further reading: His interview with Grady Booch for Computer History Museum [PDF].

The iPhone 15 Pro models are in line for a massive upgrade to their wired transfer speeds with the switch to USB-C, according to noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Unfortunately, he doesn't believe that benefit is coming to the regular 2023 iPhones. The Verge reports: He predicts that the 15 and 15 Plus will also swap in USB-C ports but, just like the 2022 10th-gen iPad, they'll be stuck with the same USB 2.0 speeds they had with Lighting. Kuo made the prediction in a series of tweets on Wednesday and says the information is from his "latest survey." (The analyst is known for getting information from supply chain sources.) He specified by predicting that the "15 Pro & 15 Pro Max will support at least USB 3.2 or Thunderbolt 3." If that's true, that'd mean they could transfer data at speeds up to 40 Gbps -- a boon for people who actually use the Pro phones to shoot a lot of ProRes video and raw photos, where even fast WiFi and cloud uploads aren't really a good substitute.

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, announced late Wednesday that his government plans to buy one Bitcoin every day starting on Thursday. Gizmodo reports: The current price of one Bitcoin is roughly $16,540, down 1.5% from a day earlier and down 73% from a year ago. Bitcoin was trading at an all-time high of over $68,000 in November 2021 when El Salvador was purchasing large quantities of Bitcoin. President Bukele has already lost El Salvador tens of millions of dollars, according to the latest calculations by Bloomberg News. El Salvador hasn't publicly confirmed how many bitcoin purchases the country has made, but based on Bukele's tweets we can determine he's purchased 2,381 Bitcoin since the start of his experiment. The price for all the country's Bitcoin holdings has totaled $105 million to purchase, according to Bloomberg, while the current worth is roughly $39.4 million. Bukele would've been smarter just holding U.S. dollars as cash, even with annual inflation at almost 8%.

Despite declaring Bitcoin an official currency in El Salvador in late 2021, few people are actually using the crypto for purchases in the country. And one of the common reasons cited for declaring it a currency, sending remittances back to the country from abroad, has been a bust as well. Roughly $6.4 billion dollars was sent as remittances to El Salvador from September 2021 until June 2022, but less than 2% of those were in cryptocurrency, according to Reuters. The Bitcoin experiment has also caused El Salvador's credit rating to get knocked down repeatedly, with the country's rating currently sitting at CC, due to the likelihood it will default on bond obligations that are coming due in 2023, according to CoinDesk.

NASA's Artemis 1 rocket blasted off the Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of Wednesday, "lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back," reports the New York Times. From the report: At around 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket's core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters. As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth's bonds. A few minutes later, the side boosters and then the giant core stage dropped away. The rocket's upper engine then ignited to carry the Orion spacecraft, where astronauts will sit during later missions, toward orbit. Less than the two hours after launch, the upper stage will fire one last time to send Orion on a path toward the moon. On Monday, Orion will pass within 60 miles of the moon's surface. After going around the moon for a couple of weeks, Orion will head back to Earth, splashing down on Dec. 11 in the Pacific Ocean, about 60 miles off the coast of California.

This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA's Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon. For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system. [...] The launch occurred years behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. The delays and cost overruns of S.L.S. and Orion highlight the shortcomings of how NASA has managed its programs. The next Artemis mission, which is to take four astronauts on a journey around the moon but not to the surface, will launch no earlier than 2024. Artemis III, in which two astronauts will land near the moon's south pole, is currently scheduled for 2025, though that date is very likely to slip further into the future. NASA posted a video of the liftoff on their Twitter. Additional updates are available @NASA_SLS.

The UK Treasury has opened an account on Discord to a torrent of abuse from users of the gamer-focused chat app -- abuse they managed to send despite the government blocking all comments on the service. The Guardian reports: With its community-focused approach, where servers encourage tight-knit groups to form and discuss issues related to the overall focus of the topic, Discord may seem an odd fit for the strait-laced world of government communications. But the app has a lot of users interested in finance, thanks to solid take-up among day traders and crypto fans, two groups the Treasury is eager to connect with. The result: a read-only Discord server, where the only user who is allowed to post is the snappily named HMTreasurySocialAdmin1, who shares tweet-length news about the Treasury and chancellor.

But trolls will always find a way. Although posting is banned, emoji reactions are enabled, letting any user respond to a post from the Treasury with a single emoji, and new users are cheerily announced in a "welcome" channel. That means the Treasury's server has been eagerly posting automated messages such as, "Welcome, LOCK UP PRINCE ANDREW. We hope you brought pizza," and "Welcome Jeremy Corbyn. Say hi!". The latter does not appear to be the real account of the former leader of the opposition. [...] UPDATE: Emoji reactions and the welcome channel vanished but eventually returned. According to the HM Treasure admin, Discord is the reason to blame for the issues.

"Due to the rapid growth of today's channel which has seen over 7,000 members join, a technical difficulty has led to reactions being paused," a post in the news channel read. "We are working with Discord to get reactions turned back on." The trolling can be continued here.

"The collapse of FTX will likely give rise to a number of criminal and civil actions against the exchange and its executives, like former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried," reports CoinDesk, citing a number of legal experts. "It's also likely to push forward actual regulatory changes, either via lawmakers or through federal agencies themselves." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: FTX filed for bankruptcy last Friday, days after halting withdrawals and a little over a week after CoinDesk first reported that the balance sheet of FTX sister company Alameda Research held a surprisingly large amount of FTT, an exchange token issued by FTX. FTX was "fine," Bankman-Fried said in response to questions about his exchange's solvency, before a series of events showed otherwise. As a result, several state and federal agencies launched or expanded investigations into the company, including the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas and the Bahamas' Financial Crimes Investigation Branch. Members of the U.S. Congress from both political parties are also calling for further action as a result of the collapse. Some lawmakers are even talking about holding hearings, potentially by the end of the year, said Ron Hammond of the Blockchain Association.

The fact that regulators apparently had no view into some of the major projects that fell apart this year -- such as Celsius, Three Arrows, Luna and now FTX -- is "precisely the problem," said an industry participant who works closely with policymakers. Still, the individual told CoinDesk that they don't expect any major legislative action to occur this year. Most likely, Congress will look at bills like the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, a bill that Bankman-Fried supported but was written prior to that, in the upcoming year. According to an attorney who requested anonymity, the SEC may have an easier time kicking off the investigation just due to its mandate. "The SEC is in a much better position to go to court and get a freeze [on assets] if they believe there's a reason to do that," the attorney said. "The SEC also has a less cumbersome process for subpoenaing testimony and freezing documents." The SEC and DOJ are likely to cooperate though, to the extent that DOJ investigators may sit in on SEC interviews.

FTX has various U.S. connections, which is all the SEC and DOJ need to assert jurisdiction for their investigations. FTX appears to be preparing for these investigations, with FTX US General Counsel Ryne Miller having already told the entire company to preserve documents. A former federal prosecutor told CoinDesk that the bankruptcy court may also shed light on the situation, thus assisting government investigators with their probes. "The bankruptcy court has the ability to now oversee the company and to obtain information from the company that, let's say the DOJ might not have been able to obtain as easily pre-bankruptcy, and they'll likely have access to a new trustee or an examiner and be able to learn in essentially real-time what's going on," the former prosecutor said. Executives like Bankman-Fried may also "be in a tough spot with respect to" deciding whether to cooperate or assert Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, the former prosecutor added. "A complicating factor -- for FTX anyway -- may be the fact that Bankman-Fried has tweeted his way through his company's collapse," adds CoinDesk.

"It's a complete nightmare," said Ken White, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at the Brown White & Osborn law firm. "This is a situation where all sorts of agencies are going to be looking at this, the SEC, the FTC, and probably the Department of Justice. There are all sorts of potential criminal and civil consequences -- lawsuits. Civil lawsuits are a certainty. And here he is sort of tweeting out his thoughts about it. It's every attorney's nightmare of what a client might do."

The main issue being that Bankman-Fried repeatedly took to Twitter to reassure users that everything was fine. "It creates new bases for criminal or civil claims against him just based on those tweets," White said. "So if he says that everything's fine, that their assets are real assets, and that's not true, then that can be securities fraud, and wire fraud, all sorts of other stuff, not to mention all sorts of civil causes of action ... It is just disastrously reckless."