2 Founders of $32 Million Centra Virtual Currency Project Are Arrested

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2 Founders of $32 Million Centra Virtual Currency Project Are Arrested

SAN FRANCISCO — Federal authorities have arrested two founders of a virtual currency that raised $32 million from investors last year and won an endorsement from the boxer Floyd Mayweather.
The co-founders of the Centra virtual currency, Sam Sharma and Robert Farkas, were arrested on Sunday, a day before the Securities and Exchange Commission released a complaint against the men and announced that it was halting the project.
Centra raised $32 million last summer and fall in a so-called initial coin offering, a method of fund-raising in which companies sell custom virtual currencies. The Centra team said at the time that the Centra token would give investors access to a new virtual currency exchange and a virtual currency debit card that would operate on the Visa and Mastercard networks.
The S.E.C. said in its complaint that the Centra team had never received approval from Visa and Ma..

To Trump, It’s the ‘Amazon Washington Post.’ To Its Editor, That’s Baloney.

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Supported by Media To Trump, It’s the ‘Amazon Washington Post.’ To Its Editor, That’s Baloney. Photo Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013, but Amazon itself has no role in the ownership of the newspaper. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times Amazon does not own The Washington Post. President Trump, however — impervious to certain facts and armed with a Twitter account — has tried hard to convince the public otherwise.
On more than one occasion, the president has called the newspaper the “Amazon Washington Post.” He has also accused it of being used as a “scam” to keep Amazon’s taxes low. And on Twitter over the weekend, he escalated his attack, declaring the “Fake Washington Post” a “lobbyist” for Amazon and demanding that it “REGISTER.”
Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, bought The Post for $250 million in 2013. Under his ownership, the paper has flourished. Buoyed by new resources, it has added more than 20..

DealBook: Facebook Should Consider a ‘Why Me?’ Button

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Facebook Should Consider a ‘Why Me?’ Button

“One of our biggest responsibilities is to protect data.”
That’s what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and co-founder, said just over a week ago after revelations that the data research firm Cambridge Analytica had gained access to the profiles of 50 million Facebook users.
Over the past year, the downside of social media companies — Facebook foremost among them — has become glaringly apparent. They have been platforms for information campaigns that influenced elections and endangered lives. They have failed to keep users’ personal information private. And the carefully targeted ads that appear on them can be, well, creepy.
Now the drumbeat for regulation of social media on both sides of the aisle — and from many in Silicon Valley — is getting louder by the day. “I think that this certain situation is so dire and has become so large that probably some well-crafted regulation is necessary,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chie..