An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Chinese authorities have arrested six suspects behind a World Cup gambling ring that was hosting more than 10 billion yuan -- or $1.5 billion USD -- worth of cryptocurrency bets, according to a statement released yesterday by the police department in Guangdong province. The gambling syndicate ran on the dark web, accepting bets in the form of bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin for an eight-month stretch before being apprehended. It attracted more than 300,000 players from different countries, and 8,000 "agents" who earned commissions for recruiting new members through a pyramid scheme-like system, according to the South China Morning Post. The bust that took down the dark web syndicate was a part of China's larger plans to stem the criminal activity -- though this was the first to involve cryptocurrency, according to Guangdong law enforcement. Thus far, they've arrested 540 suspects and frozen more than 260 million yuan as a part of their efforts.

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Hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets of central London to protest against Donald Trump's trip to Britain.

According to Anchorage Daily News, the two remaining Blockbuster stores in Alaska are set to close, leaving just one location left in the United States. The last one standing in the U.S. is in Bend, Oregon. From the report: The stores, one on DeBarr Road in Anchorage and the other in Fairbanks, will close Monday for rental business, a post on the Facebook page for Blockbuster in Alaska said Thursday afternoon. They will reopen at noon Tuesday for an inventory sales that will run through July and August. Thursday's news follows a smattering of other recent Blockbuster closures across the state, which had 13 Blockbusters in 2013 and was down to nine stores by 2016. As Blockbuster stores disappeared from most of the Lower 48 in recent years, the brand long managed to persist in Alaska. Some have said expensive internet here is one reason why. The stores have also been a destination for some who visit just for the nostalgia.

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Scientists declassify films showing atmospheric nuclear tests conducted during the Cold War.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacker gained access to a developer's npm account earlier this week and injected malicious code into a popular JavaScript library, code that was designed to steal the npm credentials of users who utilize the poisoned package inside their projects. The JavaScript (npm) package that got compromised is called eslint-scope, a sub-module of the more famous ESLint, a JavaScript code analysis toolkit. The hack took place on the night between July 11 and 12, according to the results of a preliminary investigation posted on GitHub a few hours ago. "One of our maintainers did observe that a new npm token was generated overnight (said maintainer was asleep)," said Kevin Partington, ESLint project member. Partington believes the hacker used the newly-generated npm token to authenticate and push a new version of the eslint-scope library on the npm repository of JavaScript packages.

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Is corruption among Cambodia's ruling party elite reaching all the way to Australia?

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that a number of smart TV makers include services from companies that track a range of viewer information about their customers. Now, two Democratic US senators are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate privacy problems related to Internet-connected televisions. From a report: "Many Internet-connected smart TVs are equipped with sophisticated technologies that can track the content users are watching and then use that information to tailor and deliver targeted advertisements to consumers," Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter yesterday to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons. "Regrettably, smart TV users may not be aware of the extent to which their televisions are collecting sensitive information about their viewing habits." The letter asked the FTC to "launch an investigation into the privacy policies and practices of smart TV manufacturers." When contacted by Ars, an FTC spokesperson confirmed that the agency received the letter from Markey and Blumenthal, but the FTC offered no further comment.

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Trump's visit to Britain highlights growing gap between US and UK, and the continuing Brexit woes of May's government.

According to thousands of users, Instagram website and app are facing technical issues. Users attempting to visit the website are seeing a "5xx Server Error", while on the app, they are getting "Couldn't refresh feed." According to DownDetector, a service which monitors outages on the web, more than 2,000 people have reported issues with Facebook-owned Instagram in the last 10 minutes. Update: As of 19:20 GMT, Instagram appears to have resolved the issue.

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Amazon Web Services already dominates the market for cloud services. Now, reports The Information, it is eyeing a part of the cloud business it doesn't already control: the $14 billion global market for data center switches [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: AWS is considering selling its own networking switches for business customers -- hardware devices that move traffic around networks, according to a person with direct knowledge of the cloud unit's plans and another person who has been briefed on the project. The plan could plunge Amazon more deeply into the lucrative enterprise computing market, posing a direct challenge to incumbents in the business like Cisco, along with Arista Networks and Juniper Networks. As it does in many other categories, Amazon plans to use price to undercut rivals. The company could price its white-box switches between 70% and 80% less than comparable switches from Cisco, one of the people with knowledge of the program estimated.

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Nerve agent that killed a woman in England found in a small bottle at the house of her partner, police say.

Charges are part of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Moscow's alleged interference in US presidential vote.

South Sudan has been at war since 2013, when President Salva Kiir accused then-deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

From a report: Gartner found PC shipments were up globally in Q2 2018, the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012. Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that's largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.

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Here's a timeline.

1. Each news org should produce a list of news orgs they feel produce news that's not fake. Each should use whatever criteria they feel is right. Publish the list.
2. Evolve the lists over time. This problem is not going to be solved overnight. The process will take years to sort out. In the process we will learn a lot. If it works, it will transform news to make it much more useful because it's online and not print.
3. Include blogs in the list, blogs that cover territory that you cover. For example, the NYT would include bloggers who cover neighborhoods. Tech pubs would include tech bloggers.
4. Include your entire news flow in your list. Amazingly some news orgs do not have a comprehensive list of every news article they publish in reverse-chronologic order.
5. You may choose to make your list a feature of your news site. You may also use other organizations lists as a feature on your news site.
6. Let's discuss our experiences at a future-of-news conference. After a few months' experience we should be ready to learn from each other.
7. This is not something tech companies can do for you. People whose work is producing news should come up with ideas for figuring out what is and isn't reliable news.
8. The canonical "fake news" site, Infowars, will of course produce their own list of reliable feeds. Totally valid. People who want to be informed by them may choose to do so.
9. Techies, both companies and individuals, will build news products based on the feeds. For example, Facebook might offer a choice of news selected by different news orgs.
10. This will become competitive. Some pubs lists will fall out, others will rise to the top. There will be surprises.