Michael Ford, an Atlanta native who worked at the U.S.Embassy in London (pictured), pleaded guilty to nine counts of cyberstalking, seven counts of computer hacking to extort and one count of wire fraud.State Department employee admitted Wednesday to an elaborate international sextortionist scheme in which he stole sexually explicit photos from young women and attempted to blackmail them.Embassy in London, pleaded guilty to nine counts of cyberstalking, seven counts of computer hacking to extort and one count of wire fraud.Ford targeted young women, some of whom were students at U.S.colleges and universities, with a particular focus on members of sororities and aspiring models, according to the Department of Justice.SECRET SERVICE AGENT GETS 6 YRS.FOR TAKING $820K IN BITCOIN Secret Service agent gets 6 yrs.for taking $820K in bitcoin The perverted predator used his work computer between January 2013 and May 2015 to send thousands of fraudulent “phishing” emails to potential victims, hacking into at least 450 accounts, and forwarded around 1,300 stolen email messages containing thousands of sexually explicit photographs to his own account, the DOJ said in a statement.

Ford sent threatening and “sextortionate” online communications to at least 75 victims.In one e-mail, Ford wrote, “don’t worry, it’s not like I know where you live,” then sent another e-mail to the same victim with her home address and threatened to post her photographs to an “escort/hooker website” along with her phone number and home address.Ford later described the victim’s home to her, stating “I like your red fire escape ladder, easy to climb.” The sick stalker followed through with his threats on several occasions, sending his victims’ sexually explicit photographs to family members and friends.“With nothing more than a computer and a few keystrokes, modern predators like Michael Ford can victimize hundreds of people around the world,” said Assistant Attorney General Caldwell.“While this criminal prosecution may never return the victims’ sense of security, I hope that today’s guilty plea brings them some peace of mind.” Ford will be sentenced on Feb.

Send a Letter to the EditorBitcoin Core version 0.9.0 is now available from: This is a new major version release, bringing both new features and bug fixes.Please report bugs using the issue tracker at github: If you are running an older version, shut it down.Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), uninstall all earlier versions of Bitcoin, then run the installer (on Windows) or just copy over /Applications/Bitcoin-Qt (on Mac) or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt (on Linux).bitcoin miner antminerIf you are upgrading from version 0.7.2 or earlier, the first time you run 0.9.0 your blockchain files will be re-indexed, which will take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the speed of your machine.bitcoin assassination market

On Windows, do not forget to uninstall all earlier versions of the Bitcoin client first, especially if you are switching to the 64-bit version.New in 0.9.0 is the Windows 64-bit version of the client.There have been frequent reports of users running out of virtual memory on 32-bit systems during the initial sync.Because of this it is recommended to install the 64-bit version if your system supports it.ethereum money supplyNOTE: Release candidate 2 Windows binaries are not code-signed; use PGP and the SHA256SUMS.asc file to make sure your binaries are correct.bitcoin dust collectorIn the final 0.9.0 release, Windows setup.exe binaries will be code-signed.litecoin google play0.9.0 drops support for older Macs.litecoin merchant account

The minimum requirements are now: The 'chainstate' for this release is not always compatible with previous releases, so if you run 0.9 and then decide to switch back to a 0.8.x release you might get a blockchain validation error when starting the old release (due to 'pruned outputs' being omitted from the index of unspent transaction outputs).Running the old release with the -reindex option will rebuild the chainstate data structures and correct the problem.when was litecoin createdAlso, the first time you run a 0.8.x release on a 0.9 wallet it will rescan the blockchain for missing spent coins, which will take a long time (tens of minutes on a typical machine).bitcoin dice hackTo reduce confusion between Bitcoin-the-network and Bitcoin-the-software we have renamed the reference client to Bitcoin Core.asrock bitcoin edition

On OP_RETURN: There was been some confusion and misunderstanding in the community, regarding the OP_RETURN feature in 0.9 and data in the blockchain.This change is not an endorsement of storing data in the blockchain.The OP_RETURN change creates a provably-prunable output, to avoid data storage schemes -- some of which were already deployed -- that were storing arbitrary data such as images as forever-unspendable TX outputs, bloating bitcoin's UTXO database.Storing arbitrary data in the blockchain is still a bad idea; it is less costly and far more efficient to store non-currency data elsewhere.For 0.9.0 we switched to an autotools-based build system instead of individual (q)makefiles.Using the standard "./autogen.sh; ./configure; make" to build Bitcoin-Qt and bitcoind makes it easier for experienced open source developers to contribute to the project.Be sure to check doc/build-*.md for your platform before building from source.Another change in the 0.9 release is moving away from the bitcoind executable functioning both as a server and as a RPC client.

The RPC client functionality ("tell the running bitcoin daemon to do THIS") was split into a separate executable, 'bitcoin-cli'.The RPC client code will eventually be removed from bitcoind, but will be kept for backwards compatibility for a release or two.The behavior of the walletpassphrase RPC when the wallet is already unlocked has changed between 0.8 and 0.9.The 0.8 behavior of walletpassphrase is to fail when the wallet is already unlocked: The new behavior of walletpassphrase is to set a new unlock time overriding the old one: This release contains a few fixes for transaction ID (TXID) malleability issues: This release drops the default fee required to relay transactions across the network and for miners to consider the transaction in their blocks to 0.01mBTC per kilobyte.Note that getting a transaction relayed across the network does NOT guarantee that the transaction will be accepted by a miner; by default, miners fill their blocks with 50 kilobytes of high-priority transactions, and then with 700 kilobytes of the highest-fee-per-kilobyte transactions.