U.S. prosecutors have charged Bo Zhang, a contract programmer with the Federal Reserve, with illegally copying source code from the bank’s computers onto an external harddrive while under employment at said bank. No, not that source code. The code, which the U.S. government has spent $9.5 million developing, is responsible for keeping track of the U.S. government’s finances.

Hot on the heels of the first major Bitcoin theft — an amount that nearly reached half a million dollars — Symantec caught wind of a Trojan out in the wild that specifically targets and steals Bitcoin wallets. The Trojan, called Infostealer.Coinbit, attempts to locate a Bitcoin wallet and email it to the attacker. The above is a snippet of source code Symantec found on what they call “underground forums,” which attempts to locate a Bitcoin wallet and uploads the wallet using FTP to the attacker’s servers.

Bitcoin users do have the option to encrypt their wallet for an extra layer of protection, but if someone is clever enough to steal a Bitcoin wallet, chances are they are clever enough to break an encrypted wallet open. Still, it’s always better to be safer. For more info on the Trojan, head on over to Symantec’s details page, and hopefully someone creates the computer equivalent of those old wallet-to-pocket chains for Bitcoin wallets sometime soon.

(Symantec via Hacker News)

A Bitcoin user has lost 25,000 Bitcoins — the digital peer-to-peer currency that is all the rage in digital peer-to-peer currencies these days — which currently translates to nearly half a million tangible bucks at $487,749.

First thing that I noticed is that my slush’s pool account got hacked into and someone changed the payout address to this:

15iUDqk6nLmav3B1xUHPQivDpfMruVsu9f

I then changed the password and proceeded to run some antivirus and anti malware scans. Some stuff was found, but they were all cleaned up and they were all in my windows user profile temp dir which I deleted all the temp files. God I can’t even type properly. Sorry folks I’m a bit emotional now.

I then left another virus scanner running and went to sleep. When I woke up I check my bitcoin wallet. I leave the client running to help the network, and I notice -25,000 (and a transaction fee) gone.

While taking pictures for a book about endangered African lions, wildlife photographer Roger de la Harpe came across three lionesses while in South Africa’s Tswalu Kalahari Game Reserve. He placed a digital camera on the path up ahead to see if he could record the lionesses as they hopefully passed by. Harpe got more than a quick pass, as one of the lionesses stopped at the camera, inspected it, then picked it up in her mouth and trotted off with it. Luckily, she didn’t damage the camera, and it managed to record the heist from the point of view of the lioness’ mouth. Since the camera’s lens was unobstructed and inside the lioness’ mouth, one can liken the view to what a lioness’ prey sees as it hangs from her mouth. After a few minutes, the lioness dropped the stolen item and Harpe was able to retrieve the camera with the lionesses around only 75 meters away.

(The Telegraph via Technabob)

Writer Sean Power was the victim of laptop thievery in Brooklyn; a type of gankery that rattles many of us to our very core. Luckily for him, he was using open source anti-theft program Prey and was able to track — and eventually retrieve — his stolen electronic lifeblood with the help of a posse of his Twitter followers who happened to be in the area of the tracked stolen laptop.

The story is actually quite interesting, and is even accompanied by a log of tweets documenting the tracking and recovery process, but some feel the story may actually be a hoax — a secret marketing ploy for the security software. Read on after the break for the interesting tale.

You know how half of the towels you’ve accumulated over the course of your life were stolen from hotels? Miami-based Linen Technology Tracking has patented an RFID chip that can survive a wash. They can be sewn into linen, robes and towels as an attempt to curb hotel thievery, as well as to track hotel inventory.

Currently, three hotels in Honolulu, Manhattan and Miami are using the chips, and the Honolulu hotel claims it has saved over $16,000 per month by reducing pool towel theft from 4,000 towels stolen to only 750. Reportedly, hotels are using the chips due to the rising cotton prices, and not solely because they are sick of us pilfering their seemingly inexpensive inventory.

(The New York Times via The Next Web)

The Social Science Research Council published a report called The Media Piracy Project last week, a key finding of which is that software piracy is “better described as a global pricing problem” with the only solution being copyright holders charging less for their expensive software. The study lasted for three years and focused on regions of the world such as India, Mexico and Russia, where piracy is rampant, and found that the people of those regions are no more immoral compared to people of other regions, but the reason why piracy is so rampant over there is due to the price of software being higher relative to the local incomes.

The report claims that there is no evidence that any attempt of curbing software piracy has ever stopped the frequency of it, and that the frequency of software piracy has actually grown over the past decade. The Media Piracy Project also claims that piracy doesn’t have to do as much with a strong moral debate, as it has to do with pricing and consumer demand.

In a perfect example of “you’re doing it wrong,” thieves broke into New Zealand’s New Plymouth Prison and escaped with a fifty-inch big-screen plasma television. A fire at the jail alerted firefighters to the crime scene when it set off sprinklers ten minutes before midnight. Firefighters arrived on the scene to find curtains in an administration building that were deliberately set on fire, noticed a window that was forced open, and called the police. In yet another instance of “you’re doing it wrong,” the thieves supposedly made off with the television on foot.

The thieves were either very brave, or absolutely ridiculous, as they chose to break into a minimum-to-high security prison, rather than an electronics store, to steal a plasma television, when everyone knows the only reason to break into prison is to steal your brother.

(Stuff.co.nz via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)

Almost two years ago, developer Twisted Pixel released a fun game, called ‘Splosion Man, over Xbox Live Arcade with an even more fun concept: You are ‘Splosion Man, an escaped science experiment who can blow himself up at will, repeatedly, trying to make it out of the comedically-named laboratory, Big Science. A few days ago, Capcom Mobile released MaXplosion, a game featuring the titular Max, who happens to have the ability to repeatedly explode at will, who is trying to escape an evil science laboratory. Yeah, what’s going on is pretty much what you think is going on. Head on past the break for comparison videos and some fun tweets from Twisted Pixel employees.

A worker claims he was able to smuggle a Nintendo 3DS out of a factory, and seemingly having experience with the Internet, took a bunch of pictures to prove the widely popular Internet guideline: If: Pics, Then: Happened. The 3DS doesn’t seem to do much other than be a plastic model of what a 3DS will look like, as well as display a black screen with the SDK version and memory details.