On Thursday, Ilya Lichtenstein, who was at the center of a massive 2016 crypto heist worth billions at the time, wrote online that he is now out of prison and has changed his ways.
“Ten years ago, I decided that I would hack the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world,” Lichtenstein wrote on LinkedIn, detailing a time when his startup was barely making money and he decided to steal some instead.
“This was a terrible idea. It was the worst thing I had ever done,” he added. “It upended my life, the lives of people close to me, and affected thousands of users of the exchange. I know I disappointed a lot of people who believed in me and grossly misused my talents.”
In 2023, Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan, pleaded guilty to money laundering conspiracy in a wild 2016 scheme to steal 120,000 bitcoins (worth over $10 billion today) from Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange. The pair were arrested at their Manhattan home in 2022.
Lichtenstein quickly flipped, helping the government recover the assets he had stolen and then helping the feds “on a variety of crypto cases.” He says that he enjoyed working with the government.
“When I was a black hat hacker, I was isolated and paranoid,” he wrote. “Working with the good guys, being part of a team solving a bigger problem felt surprisingly good. I realized that I could use my technical skills to make a difference.
Lichtenstein, who did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, noted that he was sentenced to 60 months in prison and spent “nearly [four] years in some of the harshest jails in the country.” While in prison, Lichtenstein says that he spent as much time as he could in the prison library studying math books to engage his mind and distract himself from his surroundings.
The 38-year-old added that he was “released to home confinement earlier this month.”
Convicted hackers cooperating with federal authorities or turning their lives around is not without precedent.
One notable example is the late Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted of multiple phone and computer crime cases in the 1980s and 1990s. Mitnick eventually started his own security consulting company and became a penetration tester and public speaker for many years before his death in 2023.
“Now begins the real challenge of regaining the community’s trust,” Lichtenstein concluded, noting that he wants to work in cybersecurity.
“I think like an adversary,” he said. “I’ve been an adversary. Now I can use those same skills to stop the next billion-dollar hack.”
The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop.
“We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”
Manufacturing bogus bugs
His comments came as cURL users complained that the move was treating the symptoms caused by AI slop without addressing the cause. The users said they were concerned the move would eliminate a key means for ensuring and maintaining the security of the tool. Stenberg largely agreed, but indicated his team had little choice.
In a separate post on Thursday, Stenberg wrote: “We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports.” An update to cURL’s official GitHub account made the termination, which takes effect at the end of this month, official.
cURL was first released three decades ago, under the name httpget and later urlget. It has since become an indispensable tool among admins, researchers, and security professionals, among others, for a wide range of tasks, including file transfers, troubleshooting buggy web software, and automating tasks. cURL is integrated into default versions of Windows, macOS, and most distributions of Linux.
As such a widely used tool for interacting with vast amounts of data online, security is paramount. Like many other software makers, cURL project members have relied on private bug reports submitted by outside researchers. To provide an incentive and to reward high-quality submissions, the project members have paid cash bounties in return for reports of high-severity vulnerabilities.
Last May, Stenberg said the number of low-quality AI-generated reports was putting a strain on the cURL security team and was likely to metastasize, hampering other software developers.
“AI slop is overwhelming maintainers *today* and it won’t stop at curl but only starts there,” he said at the time.
The lead developer has also posted a page listing some of the specious reports submitted in recent months. In response to one such report, a cURL project member wrote: “I think you're a victim of LLM hallucination.” The member continued:
The text has some similarities to the (bogus) CVE-2020-19909 and other reports. There are plenty of clues that Bard has manufactured bogus information: that code snippet of "curl_easy_setopt" doesn't match the actual signature of the function (and wouldn't even compile), a changelog that don't match reality, and more indications that this is completely bogus. I'm curious to hear what your exploit does against a made-up vulnerability. Care to share it?
After the bug reporter complained and reiterated the risk posed by the non-existent vulnerability, Stenberg jumped in and wrote: “You were fooled by an AI into believing that. In what way did we not meet our end of the deal?
Stenberg isn’t critical of AI-assisted bug reports in all cases. In September, he publicly applauded a researcher for sending a “massive list” of bugs that were found using a set of AI-assisted tools. The reports had resulted in 22 bug fixes at the time.
In an interview, Stenberg said that the reporter, Joshua Rogers, mostly used AI-powered code analyzer called ZeroPath.
"A clever person using a powerful tool," Stenberg wrote. "I believe most of the worst reports we get are from people just asking an AI bot without caring or understanding much about what it reports."
Unfortunately, such cases seem to be the exception. AI slop has already flooded music-streaming services with so many songs—often misattributed to real artists—that the platforms are slowly becoming unusable for music discovery. cURL’s move may be an early indication that something similar is happening to bug bounty programs.
The Helix Nebula is one of the most well-known and commonly photographed planetary nebulae because it resembles the "Eye of Sauron." It is also one of the closest bright nebulae to Earth, located approximately 655 light-years from our Solar System.
You may not know what this particular nebula looks like when reading its name, but the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some iconic images of it over the years. And almost certainly, you'll recognize a photograph of the Helix Nebula, shown below.
Like many objects in astronomy, planetary nebulae have a confusing name, since they are formed not by planets but by stars like our own Sun, though a little larger. Near the end of their lives, these stars shed large amounts of gas in an expanding shell that, however briefly in cosmological time, put on a grand show.
This is one of the Hubble Space Telescope's iconic images of the Helix Nebula
Credit:
NASA
Now the James Webb Space Telescope has turned its sights on the Helix Nebula, and, oh my, does it have a story to tell. NASA released the new images of the nebula on Tuesday.
In this image, there are vibrant pillars of gas along the inner region of the nebula's expanding shell of gas. According to the space agency, this is what we're seeing:
A blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula, out of the frame of the Webb image. Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas closest to the white dwarf, cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.
In Webb’s image of the Helix Nebula, color represents the temperature and chemistry. A touch of a blue hue marks the hottest gas in this field, energized by intense ultraviolet light from the white dwarf. Farther out, the gas cools into the yellow regions where hydrogen atoms join into molecules. At the outer edges, the reddish tones trace the coolest material, where gas begins to thin and dust can take shape. Together, the colors show the star’s final breath transforming into the raw ingredients for new worlds, adding to the wealth of knowledge gained from Webb about the origin of planets.
Rackspace’s new pricing for its email hosting services is “devastating,” according to a partner that has been using Rackspace as its email provider since 1999.
In recent weeks, Rackspace updated its email hosting pricing. Its standard plan is now $10 per mailbox per month. Businesses can also pay for the Rackspace Email Plus add-on for an extra $2/mailbox/month (for “file storage, mobile sync, Office-compatible apps, and messaging”), and the Archiving add-on for an extra $6/mailbox/month (for unlimited storage).
As recently as November 2025, Rackspace charged $3/mailbox/month for its Standard plan, and an extra $1/mailbox/month for the Email Plus add-on, and an additional $3/mailbox/month for the Archival add-on, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Rackspace’s reseller partners have been especially vocal about the impacts of the new pricing.
In a blog post on Thursday, web hosting service provider and Rackspace reseller Laughing Squid said Rackspace is “increasing our email pricing by an astronomical 706 percent, with only a month-and-a half’s notice.”
Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale told Ars Technica that he received the “devastating” news via email on Wednesday. The last time Rackspace increased Laughing Squid’s email prices was by 55 percent in 2019, he said.
“The price increase has a major impact on the ability to make money due to the fact that email is now our largest expense, and we were only given a month-and-a-half notice,” Beale told Ars.
Online, there are reports of Rackspace partners being quoted email pricing increases of 110 percent to nearly 500 percent. The reports say that the new, higher-per-mailbox quotes don’t include volume pricing discounts. Beale noted that Laughing Squid’s quote doesn’t include discounts that the company previously received.
“We had really good reseller pricing that we negotiated with Rackspace due to the number of mailboxes we had with them and how long we had been a customer. All of that seemed to vanish when they notified us of their new pricing,” he said.
Ars contacted Rackspace asking about the 706 percent price hike that Laughing Squid says it’s facing, why Rackspace decided to increase its prices now, and why it didn’t give its partners more advanced notice. A company spokesperson responded, saying:
Rackspace Email is a reliable and secure business-class email solution for small businesses. To continue delivering the service levels our customers expect, effective March 2026, Rackspace Technology is increasing the price of Rackspace Email. We have a support team available to help our customers to discuss their options.
The spokesperson added that Rackspace’s “mission is to deliver quality, trusted and reliable hosted email solution for businesses.”
Email hosting is a tough business
Despite Rackspace’s stated commitment to email hosting, the prohibitive pricing seems like a deterrent for a business being viewed as high-effort and low-margin. Email has grown complex over the years, requiring time and expertise for proper management at scale. It’s become simpler, or more lucrative, for some cloud companies to focus on selling their managed services on top of offerings like Microsoft 365—as Rackspace does—or Google Workspace and let the larger companies behind those solutions deal with infrastructure costs and complexities.
Meanwhile, Laughing Squid is increasing prices for Rackspace mailboxes and offering services with a different email provider, PolarisMail, to customers at lower prices. Beale said he has reached out to Rackspace about the new pricing but hasn’t heard back yet.
Born in 1853 in Mobile, Alabama, Alva Smith came from the white elite South, which meant massive numbers of slaves. Her family had a lot of southern politicians and merchants in it and all the money came from owning humans. The family was so wealthy and, importantly, economically diversified, so the end of the slavery didn’t have that much effect on their wealth. But like most old fortunes, many of which are still around today, the generation of the wealth came from humans, which is why we need the government to nationalize all wealth created from the slave trade and its descendants and redistribute it through a process of reparations.
Anyway, because of their slave money, Smith and her family summered in Newport, Rhode Island, went on long extended European trips, all that Gilded Age rich person stuff. In fact, they had left Mobile in 1859 for New York City anyway, not wanting to be in the sticks, but more than happy to continue making money off the enslavement of humans. Like a lot of these families, there was some postwar downward mobility though, exacerbated by lunacy spending habits. It was a family of daughters, so Alva was married off to a family that could certainly help with the income. She married William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius, in 1875. By no account was there any love in this marriage. She claimed she did it for the family, others said she did it for herself, why not both?
This bad marriage did result in three children and it resulted in Alva Vanderbilt now becoming one of the queens of the Gilded Age. She was excellent at hosting parties, doing the New York scene, all that stuff that modern interpreters of the Gilded Age love to show on bad TV shows that appeal to white liberals who like fancy costumes. But this was not a happy couple at all. He cheated on her all the time. She took it for awhile. But then, in 1895, she did something that almost no society woman had ever done before–she divorced him. Divorce was super scandalous and among the rich, extra super scandalous. She immediately married one of her husband’s best friends, Oliver Belmont.
Alva Belmont would later extrapolate from her own experiences and become a major feminist. But that took awhile. Basically, she spent then next 23 years being the ultimate in elite Gilded Age women, with all that meant. In 1909 though, she decided to get involved in the growing suffrage movement. Like most people who end up in organizing, she had to be organized herself. In this case, it was Katherine Duer McKay, a good friend of Belmont’s, who started going to suffrage meetings and dragged Belmont along. It didn’t take long for Belmont to be all-in.
Belmont wasn’t content to be a random member. She was right about one thing too–the National American Women Suffrage Association was a bunch of old women stuck in the past with failed strategies. She thought them a bunch of dull fuddy-duddies. She knew the movement needed a new spark. So she more or less took over, not holding office, but funding it and giving speeches. Of course the funding is what really mattered here. She had all the money in the world and this is what she chose to spend it on. Belmont went to England and met the Pankhursts. She wasn’t quite ready to throw herself in front of horses on the race track to die, but she appreciated the militancy. So she brought some of that back from New York, began challenging politicians more directly, and made a ton of enemies within the movement, as often happens with new energy and ideas.
One reason she made enemies is that she supported Black women voting, at least in New York. As soon as I read she had enemies among southern suffragists, I assumed this was the reason and indeed, she was much better on race than many leading suffragists. She attended big meetings of Black suffragists, gave them money, opened a settlement house in Harlem that expanded that Progressive Era idea into Black communities, invited Black women to her home, and all the things that made most white suffragists sick. Of course, Belmont wasn’t perfect from our modern standards. Who is? No one. So she joined other Progressives in working to make sex work illegal, which does nothing but put women’s lives in danger.
Belmont helped Alice Paul form the National Women’s Party in 1916, including proving the house in Washington where they operated. She helped organize the picketing of the Wilson White House in 1917 that got a ton of attention and horror from more conservative minded suffragists. Then of course women got the vote thanks to the 19th Amendment. Years of work had paid off. Belmont was elected president on the NWP in 1917 and held that position until her death, but of course it was Paul who ran the show on a daily basis, especially in Belmont’s later years.
After the suffrage was won, Belmont mostly retreated back from politics. She was a rich woman after all with all the choices that wealth offered. Her daughter was living in France, so she chose to mostly be with her. She did continue her support for the Equal Rights Amendment and working with Paul, but more from a distance, thought with her significant financing of the movement, she was still critically important. I don’t know Belmont’s class politics really. Paul was a bitter anti-worker woman and because of this Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins refused to support the ERA until very late in their lives. Given that Belmont was super rich, I would not all be surprised if she basically agreed with Paul, but it wasn’t until the New Deal that Paul’s true contempt for the working class became clear and by then, Belmont was gone. But it’s safe to say that Belmont did not support protective legislation for women workers, which was the root of the civil war in the women’s movement during the 20s, since the NWP was explicitly opposed to that. However, Belmont, like many Progressives, had supported the Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909, that movement of working women. But at that time, it was about linking working women to suffrage and so the politics were different than 20 years later.
In 1932, Belmont suffered a stroke. The next year, she died, both because of that and other issues revolving around being old. She was 80 years old.
Alva Belmont is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. The Bronx, New York. I hope it’s spacious enough for her.
If you would like this series to visit other suffrage activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lillian Feickert is in Scotch Plains, New Jersey and Paulina Davis is in Providence, Rhode Island. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
GameStop's surprisingly extended run may be coming to an end, though, with Polygon reporting late last week that GameStop has abruptly shut down 400 stores across the US, with even more closures expected before the end of the month. That comes on top of 590 US stores that were shuttered in fiscal 2024 (which ended in January 2025) and stated plans to close hundreds of remaining international stores across Canada, Australia, and Europe in the coming months, per SEC filings.
GameStop still had just over 3,200 stores worldwide as of February 1, 2025, so even hundreds of new and planned store closures don't literally mean the immediate end of the company as a going concern. But when you consider that there were still nearly 6,000 GameStop locations worldwide as of 2019—nearly 4,000 of which were in the US—the long-term trend is clear.
Remember when NFTs like this were gonna reverse GameStop's fortunes?
Credit:
GameStop NFT
Just as Tower Records couldn't continue to exist in a world where almost all music was being downloaded or streamed, a chain devoted to selling games on physical discs can't sustain itself in a world where the vast majority of game spending is now online.
Seeing the writing on the wall, GameStop has made a number of attempts to rebrand around something other than selling (or re-selling) physical video games. Anyone else remember the chain's abortive attempt to restructure around "high margin immersive experiential gaming content" like esports? How about the rollout of "GameStop Retro" locations that sell games and hardware dating back to the last century? Or the much-hyped NFT marketplace that GameStop quietly wound down in 2023?
So even though GameStop has lasted longer than I expected, I'm still relatively confident in predicting that the end is coming for the retailer sooner rather than later. Who knows, though, maybe I'll be writing another article like this in 2033, marveling at how a once-lumbering giant in the world of video game sales is somehow continuing to limp along.
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This is one of the Hubble Space Telescope's iconic images of the Helix Nebula
Credit:
NASA
Remember when NFTs like this were gonna reverse GameStop's fortunes?
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