federal reserve

Authorities arrested a computer programmer today and charged him with stealing source code worth $9.5 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Bo Zhang, 32, is accused of taking the software last summer while he was working as a contract employee assigned to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Zhang allegedly admitted that in July 2011 he checked out and copied the code onto an external hard drive and on to his own computers, according to the complaint unsealed today. He said he used the code in connection with a computer programming training company he operated, … Read more

The Anonymous hacker group says it plans to target the Federal Reserve starting tomorrow, most likely with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to shut down the agency's Web site.

In a YouTube video, the group is calling for public protests until Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke steps down. The campaign, dubbed Operation Empire State Rebellion, is timed to coincide with Flag Day in the U.S., which is June 14 and commemorates the adoption of the national flag in 1777.

The group, which has made a name for itself organizing random anonymous Internet users and getting them … Read more

On today's show, it's the Summer of Hackers: Anonymous hits the Spanish police website and threatens the Federal Reserve (which, frankly, we find to be a target that's probably worthy of a little DDoS action). Plus, a nation-state may have hacked IMF, but they're not saying much, and the Bitcoin market crashes (buy low!). Plus, scientists create jellyfish that can shoot tiny, weak lasers ... a stepping stone to the scariest sharks ever.

NEW YORK--When my friend told me he thought there was a chance he could help me get to see the largest deposit of gold on the planet, you might say I was a little excited.

It's not that I hadn't seen the visceral representation of massive wealth up close and personal, and even recently. After all, only last month, I got a behind-the-scenes tour of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving & Printing's production line of the brand-new, next-generation $100 bills, and found myself staring at $38.4 million in cash.

And not long after that, I … Read more

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that "I don't see the end in sight." The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before "too long," the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close … Read more

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is best known for his sense of humor. He seems to be developing a sense of social responsibility, too.

Adams' blog is one of my favorite places on the Internet, one of only a handful of pages I try to check every day.

I like his blog because Adams is both funny and smart. He understands that he can exert a certain amount of public influence, but unlike most celebrities, he's smart enough to recognize his own limits. He's also smart enough to expand those limits by gathering data and studying the opinions of others.

Earlier this month, Adams spent his own money on what he calls the Dilbert Survey of Economists, gathering the opinions of over 500 professional economists to see if they could tell us anything useful about McCain's and Obama's economic plans.

They couldn't, really--ask 10 economists to count their own fingers and you're likely to get 11 different answers--but this in itself is good information, because it teaches us that economics is not yet a real science.

On Tuesday, Adams asked the readers of his blog (a valuable if unreliable resource) to help him find a good analysis of the potential consequences of allowing the free market to deal with the recent market meltdown. … Read more